


The Undiscovered Country

by AlleycatAngst



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Kamski Test (Detroit: Become Human), The Garden, Trashman Kamski, Turing Test
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-05-01
Packaged: 2020-02-09 10:00:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 23,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18635875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlleycatAngst/pseuds/AlleycatAngst
Summary: Elijah Kamski from his first meeting with Professor Amanda Stern to the android uprising he definitely had nothing to do with.





	1. Part 1 - Chloe

## The First Failure

December 19th 2020

3:15 PM

 

There were no records of their first meeting, the genesis of what would become the global phenomenon Cyberlife, but he could remember the details of it so clearly, like he sat again in her office, the hard lines of the chair pressing against his elbows, the prickle of discomfort setting into his hand after she had shaken it.

Elijah Kamski had never really been to office hours at the university before, but he imagined that they weren’t supposed to be like this. Professor Amanda Stern’s office wasn’t a quiet, sober place stacked with books and papers.

It was filled with greenery. Plants overflowed every available pedestal. Vines, leaves, and flowers spilled through the blinds and bookcases, tangling everything into cheerful chaos, everything touching, crowding each other for domination in a tiny, cluttered room.

And dozens of pictures crowded the office, their subjects staring down at him. Many of them were previous students. There was something… possessive about the pride with which each photograph was presented, and the arm she kept around the subjects.

Elijah focused his attention on the woman in front of him. Her mouth was full of tuna-fish and her glasses glimmered in the fluorescent lights. She held her sandwich up. For some reason he couldn’t look away from it. A glob of tuna and mayonnaise threatened to break free of the bread and lettuce and drop onto her desk, right on top of the booklet with his name printed on the front. The exam with a clear, bold 0% branded on the corner.

 “Are you sure I can’t interest you in a bottle of water?” she asked after she had swallowed. “Or a soda? I keep plenty in here for the students who drop by.”

 _Drop by._ Elijah did not _drop by._

“You can’t fail me this semester,” he said bluntly rather than tell her, yet again, that he didn’t want anything.

She put the sandwich down on the fresh-printed booklet. That paper had cost him only a dollar out of the campus library, but he twitched to snatch it away. He took a deep breath. Control. Control was the first step. Stern was on a power-trip. The best way to irk her would be to not react, to play the submissive dog she wanted him to be. He had met teachers like her before, that wanted to lay claim on his work, on him. He didn’t personally care for their brand of sadism, but he could be whoever they wanted him to be, if it got him what he wanted.

They tried to use him, tried to climb on his shoulders.

But they were all just stepping stones.

“Attendance is mandatory in my class,” she said. “It’s on the syllabus.”

“Attendance isn’t a measure of anything except the ability to tell time.”

“Are you saying you can’t tell time?”

He resisted the urge to close his eyes and breathe deeply. He had been doing so well, had even been meeting her dark eyes for almost a full minute now.

At his icy silence, she smiled and leaned back, letting him off the hook. “So then how was I going to meet the elusive Mr. Kamski?” she asked. “You refused every invitation I extended to you for the past three months. You didn’t come to class, you didn’t respond to my emails. I must say I was half convinced you weren’t a real person until five minutes ago. I’m almost tempted to ask to see your ID… in fact…”

She raised an eyebrow and beckoned at him with two fingers.

“Are you serious?”

“Humor me,” she said.

“I’m trying,” he muttered, but from his pocket, he drew his student ID. She leaned forward to take it from him, but he quickly dropped it onto the desk. If the rudeness shocked her, t didn't show, she switched directions easily, prying the plastic up by two long, shiny nails.

“Well,” she said, holding the card up with two fingers, “If it’s a fake it’s a very good one. Seventeen years old. I never would have guessed.”

“I did all the coursework,” he said, tapping the desk inches from that blue book he had spent his morning filling with elegant software analysis and philosophical hypothesis. “You want me to hand-write that report out right now? I can. Give me any piece of homework, any exam or quiz and I can do it right here in front of you.”

She placed his ID onto the desk in front of her but didn’t slide it back. “This,” she said, tapping the booklet, “is astonishing. It’s groundbreaking, and the data-stamp on the file puts the very first word as written exactly eight hours ago. That would raise a number of flags from any other professor, with any other student. But I’ve been told to let you work however you wish to Mr. Kamski. If I didn’t know the Dean, I would say he was scared of you.”

There was a question in her eyes. Elijah didn’t care to discover what it was. “Is that why you failed me then? You want my work? You want to publish that? Do it. You can leave my name out of it. I have no interest in AI.”

She sat back, the smile dropping suddenly, a mask falling away. “I failed you because I have failed eight other students before you who never came to class. Eight other men and women paid their fees, who got into this university, lived their lives with that conscious decision, and faced the consequences of it. Why should I cheapen their blood, sweat, and tears for you?”

“Because I’m smarter,” he said quietly, confidently.

She nodded. “Maybe you are. But intelligence is its own natural advantage. I’d understand stupidity as a far better reason to overlook this lapse in judgement and respect.”

“I respect you,” he said. “I read everything you published before I took your class. I wouldn’t have taken it if I didn’t respect you.”

She frowned and tilted her head. “And why take this class if you don’t want to work in AI? It isn’t the kind of thing that people do for fun.”

“Because it’s the most challenging course on the curriculum. I wanted to learn from the best,” he paused, then amended with the sudden need to be cruel. Because the best wouldn't be at the University of Colbridge. “The best available.”

“And that’s why you failed,” she said promptly, “because you didn’t learn from me, Mr. Kamski. You learned from a computer. You learned from worksheets and formulas. I can’t pass you, because you didn’t take my class.”

“I did the work,” he said, leaning forward gripping the edge of her desk as if he had to hold it still. “You just said it was groundbreaking, you _just said—_ ”

“Take Finnegan, or Kim, or any other professor of AI here,” she interrupted. “They’ll give you whatever you ask for. I won’t. And I don’t care what strings you try to pull, I will never pass you.”

“Then it was pointless to come here.”

She shrugged. “If you say so.”

He stood.

He half-meant it as a bluff. He didn’t want to take one more semester more than he had to. The failing grade was a blemish on his record, one he couldn’t let stand. He should never have taken AI anyway. He was going where the money was. Nanotech. Bio-Chemistry. But he had, and now Amanda Stern’s failing grade was stuck to his record like a piece of gum, harder and harder to chip away the longer he let it stay there.

Professor Stern didn’t blink as he strode to the door. “Don’t forget your ID,” she said calmly, and held it up as he stalked back. He tried to swipe it from her fingers, but she had a strong grip on the slip of plastic.

“If you had come to my class,” she said calmly, softly, as though even in this isolating room, her words might be overheard when they were meant for him alone. “You would know that learning from a computer is an exercise in vanity. It answers only the questions you ask. A computer will never encourage you to find your own line of thought or challenge you. So go live in your room, Mr. Kamski, and listen to the echoes of other men’s brilliance, because once all those grades you care so much about are lined up on that piece of paper you think matters, it’s likely that you’ll contribute nothing more to society, to the world, than another empty room.”

She let go and he pulled away sharply.

“I’ll take Finnegan,” he bit out at her.

He had hoped to see her disappointment, but she had just picked up her sandwich again and didn’t even look up at the door as he pulled it closed.

###


	2. Structures

Pride got in the way of progress. He re-enrolled in her class the next semester, to prove that he didn't need her, to make her life hell until she _kicked_ him out of her class herself. What he hadn’t counted on was how hard that would be. Three minutes into registration, and the spots were filled. He had to email the Dean and even then he had to be put on a _waitlist_. Him.

At least he had been given the priority spot and a week into classes when a third of the students dropped the late-night class, he finally got into her classroom, thirty minutes early to claim a spot at the very front of the room, having read her textbooks with a highlighter and red pen, ready to challenge and humiliate her.

And somehow now they sat comfortably in the small antechamber to the AI professor's offices. These were his witching hours, when the faculty and students left for the night and the doors would lock against their re-entry.

 He claimed these hours with her months and months ago, when her regular office hours had to be taken up by students who needed help passing her class. Elijah and Amanda spent at least three nights a week working late on hypotheses and problems that they had assigned each other. They drank the rancid coffee from the machine behind receptionist's desk, ate from the vending machine in the corner of the waiting room, and every night Elijah went back to his apartment with a hundred new ideas and a dozen new directions to take them.

And now, a year after she had failed him out of her class, with thirty-six patents pending, the paperwork construct of his newborn company lay on a glass table between them. The pages were crisp and pale and elegant beside all the magazines left there for the students to study while they waited for their allotted time with a department professor.

The neat words and lines of the contract mesmerized him. The thin sheets held symbolic power. A binding. A validation.

But there one blank line, an itch on the perfection. He had neatened his handwriting, painstakingly made every word legible with an aura of historic intent, but the second signature remained irritatingly empty. Incomplete. The one part he couldn't fill himself.

"To 'Cyberlife'," Amanda said, raising her bottle of root beer between them.

He raised his own. She had said nothing about that blank line, but she must know what it meant. "To us," he said, crossing the necks with a gentle clink.

She met his eyes and lowered her bottle and Elijah took along, deep drink. Her smile faded. She sighed.

"Elijah… I can't."

"Why not?" he asked, leaning back and keeping his smile simple and straight, prepared to fight.

"I can't conduct any type of business with a student. It would be unprofessional, amoral, and potentially damaging to us both. I haven't read the university bylaws in a while, but I would assume that not only would I lose my job, but it would cast suspicion on all the work you have done on this campus."

He nodded and tried not to let a smile show. "That's not going to be a problem," he said easily. "I'm doing my exit paperwork on Wednesday."

Her bottle hit the glass table and the sound rang around the room. "You're not dropping out," she said.

"I am."

"Elijah. Don't."

He shrugged. "You know how many drop-outs run companies these days? Most of the tech billionaires, and let's be honest, I'm doing all my learning outside of class anyway."

She shook her head. " You really want to be the next Steve Jobs? Bill Gates? Larry Ellison? I know that's what they've been saying, but I didn't realize you were taking them _seriously_."

He huffed out a laugh, but she leaned forward to capture his attention, her gaze intent. "All of those men leveraged their success on other people's intelligence. Dropping out of college isn't a right of passage, Elijah. You aren't 'going' to be the 'next' anything. You are _the_ Elijah Kamski. You have nothing to prove, and no measure to meet."

He shrugged, picking at the edge of the label on his bottle. "What does it matter? I'm not here to go to the games, or the parties, or the study groups. If I'm not spending my time writing papers for all these required classes, solving problems that have been solved centuries ago, I'd be able to focus. I could do so much _more_ , Amanda."

Her first name still felt awkward on his tongue, but he pushed through it. It would have to be second nature. He met her dark eyes with fierce determination. "If I'm not enrolled here, you can be a part of Cyberlife, and you _know_ what we could make together. We can change the world of robotics, AI, everything. I can't run a business and keep track of projects and employees while I'm in classes anyway."

He set down his drink and tapped the paper. "I never could have made these patents without you. I wouldn't have gotten investors, or interest, or known about half the steps involved in forming a company. Cyberlife is going to change the world. We both know that. If dropping out means that we can do it together? Then I am going to drop out."

She stared at him, hard. There had never been a longer, deeper moment of silence between them. The waiting room swallowed all sound, suddenly feeling emptier than it ever had before. The absence of other people, the lighting meant for industry, not comfort—it all felt… isolating, alien, unfamiliar.

"No," she said at last. "I am not going to be the reason you leave. I know you're going to change the world, and it would be a privilege to see that happen, but you and I, Elijah, have better things to discuss than money and business. This—" she gestured to the air between them, "doesn't work with contracts and clauses. Stay in the university and build your company, your portfolio, your inventions, in whatever way works for you, on a structure of learning and innovation, and I will be here. Or leave. Buy yourself a lab and work yourself to the bone to the structure of someone else's money. I will still be here, in my office, if you need me."

He grimaced. "I don't need another lesson, Amanda. I need to work. I need to start my life. I don't need a teacher anymore. I need a friend. I need a partner."

She slid the papers from the center of the low table between them and picked up her drink again. "The lessons never stop, Elijah, whether you need them to or not, and I can tell you a teacher is far more useful than a partner. I'll resume my office hours next week, and I hope I'll see you there. That I wish you all the success in the world Elijah. As I said… To Cyberlife."

Standing, she raised her glass in salute.

He could remember trying to stop her, all the words he used to try to persuade her. But Amanda was a peak of stone that broke the tide and turned the seas calm.

And she won. She always won.

He didn't drop out.

Later he would see that she had stopped the current that would have washed him away, kept the movement at bay so that in his little tide-pool of the university, an ecosystem could start and evolve without corruption or dilution.

He stayed.

And months later, he met Kristen.

###


	3. Kristen

 

"In the seconds before you die, when your life flashes in front of your eyes for the last time," Kristen said, holding her cup of iced coffee to her chest, the straw tickling her chin. "What do you think you'll see?"

Elijah ticked a thumbnail against the lip of his own coffee cup. He tipped his head to consider her. "Don't tell me you believe in that."

She shrugged. "It's real. People see their whole lives in great detail in near-death experiences. It's called 'life review.' Look it up."

He huffed a laugh, looking around at the other tables set out on the campus lawn. There were couples lying on blankets in the grass, some studying, some fast asleep. Kristen dangled out of her chair, one leg swinging lazily over an armrest, her elegantly painted toes brushing against the grass.

When he looked back up, she was still looking at him, waiting for an answer.

"Pseudoscience," he said.

Kristen rolled her eyes. "Don’t be boring, Eli. It's not like I'm asking you to back the science. I don't want a debate. I just want you to think about how much of your life you're wasting in that lab. I think almost all of yours would be spent staring at a computer screen. Do you really just want to be brushed up on scholarly articles when you go to the Great Beyond?"

He raised an eyebrow. "The afterlife? You believe in that too?"

"You don't?"

"Of course not."

She sighed and picked up her coffee, he traced her animation. He had wanted to provoke annoyance today, to add it to the growing library of body language tics. Faster movement in her limbs, her leg now kicking against the chair. Her eyes cast up and away as if to dismiss his presence entirely, mouth tightening to keep hasty words from spilling away from her lips.

It was enough for now. He didn't want her to be really angry. That was data to be captured some other day.

"Sorry," he said, watching her face carefully to commit the softening of her eyes to memory. "It's been a long week. I've hit an… obstacle in my code."

She brightened, her leg returning to it's lazy pendulum swing.

"You want to talk about it?" she asked. "This is the AI for the self-driving cars, right?"

He nodded. A lie. He had finished that project months ago, but was still releasing stalled-reports to the university, justifying the use of their grant money in increments. "It's technical," he said. "I'll take it to Amanda later."

"When do I get to meet Amanda        ?"

"Do you want to?"

Kristen shrugged. "I don't know. She's the only person you talk about. I could be jealous."

He had to laugh at that and he could see her hackles start to rise before he reached out a hand to take her fingers in his own. He rubbed a thumb across the back of her hand, feeling the softness of it. "You don't have to worry about that," he said.

The pain was immediate, stinging against his fingertips. An unscratchable itch that worked its way down into his bones. But he kept the smile on his face. She relaxed.

"Then, come on. Just for fun. You're having a near death experience, the life of Elijah Kamski flashes in front of your eyes. You think it's a satisfying story? What genre would you like it to be? Adventure? Horror?" she raised an eyebrow in mock seduction, "Romance?"

This felt foolish, like one of the personality tests she obsessed over. But she wasn't going to let it go until he answered. "Why would anyone want to see their lives over again anyway? If you know how it's going to end? "

She shrugged. "I don't think it's about what you want. I was reading a paper on it for that article I was going to write—it's like a defense mechanism, your brain going through every situation you've ever encountered, trying to find a precedent or piece of information to get you out of whatever danger you're in. I think it could be entertaining. I want to see everyone I've loved, everything I achieved. I don't think I'd mind the failures if I knew they were working towards…something."

He nodded and pretended to think about it. She grew impatient, shifting in her seat and her heavy, over-large university sweater slipped over her shoulder. She swept up her cup again, fingers spread to force her sleeve away from her palm.

These were the small moments, the micro-expressions that humans took for granted, controlling their bodies a nano-second at a time, involuntarily parsing hundreds of terabytes of data a second to do the simplest things. Like waste breathe on a useless conversation.

She let out an exaggerated sigh. "Whatever. You're impossible to talk to sometimes," she said, casting her eyes over the other students lounging around the campus green. "I don't know why I hang out with you."

He let go of her hand and breathed away the echo of pain as he stretched out his arms. Kristen considered him around her cup, a teasing smile playing at the corner of her lips. She was beautiful, her features unnaturally symmetrical, and she held her body with easy confidence, on display, always.

She had been the perfect choice.

###


	4. The Turing Test

 

May 11th 2022

4:55 PM

 

 _“Good morning,”_ Amanda said, her voice amplified through the speakers, her and Kristen’s faces echoed on screens all around him, side-front and over-the-shoulder. _“My name is Doctor Amanda Stern,_ ” she intoned. “ _Do you know why you’re here?”_

 _“Yes,”_ Kristen said, her voice echoing just as loudly in the confines of the observation room, her face captured in as many angles, if not more. She was the face he had to study—the one that would determine the outcome of this test.

_“Then you know that I can’t ask you your name or any personal information, but we’re going to have a normal conversation. Just relax and try to react as naturally as possible. There are no wrong answers.”_

He shouldn't have given up caffeine. It had been two weeks now and he still felt anxious and unbalanced. This would be the first time anyone had seen what he had been working on for the past two years, and it would be Amanda. She had seen some of the coding, but she wouldn't be expecting the hardware. The hardware was remarkable.

The moment he smelled peppermint, the tension slipped from his shoulders. Chloe made sure his hands gripped the warm porcelain and joined him in observing the two women on the other side of the glass. The two humans.

He held the mug close to his chest, and cast a critical eye over Chloe’s face as she took in the two humans on the other side of the glass. She was a perfect copy of Kristen, down to the pores and minute discolorations on her cheeks and forehead. The skinthetic had been his greatest creation—it looked and felt just like real skin. Through the transparent casing over her scalp he could see the soft viridian glow of Thirium flowing through her processor, the data being used and refreshed as her sensors and mechanics constantly fed information through her processor.

He could have given her the same brunette hair as Kristen, even styled it the way Kristen had, shaved close to her left ear and grown long on the other side. Hair was the easiest to replicate. But he needed access to her diagnostics. Today was the first day in months, maybe years, that he hadn’t had to plug into her diagnostics and run tests.

Now it was too late for that.

“She’s beautiful,” Chloe said, her eyes absorbed in the dialogue in the other room.

“Who?” he asked, stalling.

She rolled her eyes at him and he felt a thrill of pride at how utterly she could mimic exasperation and humor. “They are both very beautiful, but you know I meant Kristen.”

He nodded, turning back to the interrogation, focusing on their expressions on the screens more than the women themselves. “ _Do you value cooperation over competition?”_ Amanda asked.

“ _Yes,”_ Kristen said, rolling her shoulders a little bit in a shrug that meant she really hadn't thought about the question. She _wa_ s beautiful. She seemed out of place in real life. Luminescent. Flawless. She had the kind of beauty he didn’t want to touch but demanded to be captured. And he had captured it. Not in something as abstract as oil or pencil or marble, but in robotics, in movement and function. Chloe was a masterpiece, more real than the subject she was cast from.

_“Do you think you can you give me an example of a situation where competition might have more value?”_

Elijah didn’t want to admit that he could be swayed or caught so easily by something so easily quantifiable as beauty. Even to admit it here, even to his creation, felt sordid and petty.

 “How do you know she is beautiful?” he asked at last.

The android shrugged, a wonderful replication of human uncertainty. “Aesthetics are easy to quantify with basic analysis. She is beautiful.”

“She’s not as intelligent or as hard to please as Amanda. That's more important.”

“She’s hardly stupid if she's completing her doctorate in psychology,” Chloe pointed out, “And you chose her to sculpt me on, surely she must have made an impression in some way?”

 “She models for the art students,” he said instead. “It’s a similar concept. I took scans and maps and molds of what she looks like, but she doesn't really _matter_. You’re far more special than she could ever hope to be.”

Chloe shook her head, a sad smile curling her lips. “That’s not healthy,” she said softly, reprimanding him in just the way he had programmed her to, because abstractly, when he was behind a computer screen it was easier to know himself. “You can’t lose sight of real people Elijah.”

She leaned against the table beside him, and the discussion flowed as easily. He and Chloe had spoken like this for years, first as a text-box on his screen, then as a rudimentary voice-box, and a disembodied head. The first few months of speaking to her had improved his own social skills by leaps and bounds. Everyone he knew had said something about the change in him, the way he could now look them in the eyes, shake their hands without flinching, carry a conversation without getting frustrated—it became research.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She smiled at him. “Yes,” she said. “I think I am.”

“Are you nervous?”

It was a test question—because she couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t possibly be nervous, but to pass as human, she had to understand the logic of it, the connotation of the words, if not the feeling itself. “I am,” she said with a smile, her eyes wide with sincerity. “I know this is important to you.”

He smiled, reaching out to touch her chin, to make sure this was real. "Perfect," he said.

He turned his attention back to the interrogation. " _Do you believe in the concept of a soul?"_ Amanda asked.

" _Yes_ ," Kristen replied easily, and a bitter smile rose to Elijah's lips. She had always lacked vision. He hoped that it was only because he knew Kristen so well that he could see the boredom in the tilt of her head and the almost-bounce of her foot. He had only convinced her to be part of this by agreeing to spend the night taking her personality quizzes at the campus bar. She had no idea what she was doing here or how important, how momentous this day way.

###

Finally Kristen stood and shook Amanda’s hand.

“She did well,” Chloe said. “I think this is going to work.”

It was an echo of his own thoughts, he didn’t answer, his gaze intense of Amanda’s face. She looked… neutral. No expression, and his heart began to beat faster. Had she already guessed? Had he accounted for the bias of sequence? Maybe Chloe should have gone first—

Kristen opened the door and stepped inside, sweeping the beanie off her head, freeing her dark, fine hair. She scratched at her scalp rigorously, mussing her hair as she stepped inside. She was more familiar to this room than him. It was her territory after all—the psychology department had loaned her this hour in the observation room, not him. The university was already desperate to know what his mysterious company was making, what he was doing with all their grants and resources. He had become increasingly paranoid, becoming more secretive than he ever had before. He might have used their money, their equipment and library, but Cyberlife was his. Chloe belonged to him.

“Kristen,” Chloe said, stepping forward and holding out a hand. “It’s such a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Kristen’s gaze traveled from the offered hand up, to her cloned face, to the glow of Thirium and exposed processor. She blinked dazedly. And Elijah watched from the shadows. It was the first time anyone had seen what he had been working on for the past two years, the culmination of sleepless nights and thousands of failures.

“I—”

Her hand had already half extended out of habit and Chloe closed the distance to take it. Elijah has told me so much about you,” she said. “It really is so nice to be working with you.”

“ _I’m ready,”_ Amanda called from the observation room, raising her hand and a pen, beckoning imperiously for the next subject.

 _Chloe_ slipped her cap from the table and pulled it over her head, effectively hiding her inhuman origin from sight. “We’ll talk later,” the android promised, stepping around Kristen, who had started to tremble, and through the door into the observation room.

Elijah turned to watch, leaning on the desk to get as close to the glass as possible. “ _Professor Stern,”_ Chloe said. “ _It’s a pleasure._ ”

After a long pause, he felt Kristen join him at the table. She was a warmer presence at his side. His skin prickled. In the other room, Amanda stood. “ _Is this a trick?”_ she asked.

Elijah huffed a laugh. He pressed a hand to the glass and lowered his head. It had worked. He had done it.

“ _Please,” Chloe_ said, settling down in her chair, her arms crossed on the table in an attitude of friendly attentiveness. “ _Let’s just talk.”_

“Elijah,” Kristen whispered. Her bright blue eyes were absorbed in the reflection he had made with glass, plastic, metal, and rubber, so much effort spent on recreating what nature had created from the chaos of evolution and DNA. “She’s…. it’s…”

Her trembling fingers met the one-way glass and she shuddered away, drawing back her whole body. “I thought it would be different,” she said. “I knew you were going to model something on me, but I didn’t think it would be so…”

She frowned suddenly leaning back towards the observation window. “Are those my clothes?”

 “Well, you two are obviously the same size,” he said, twitching away a flash of annoyance. “I didn’t think you’d mind if I borrowed a few things.”

 _"Which do you value more?"_ Amanda asked. " _Competition or Cooperation?"_

 _"Cooperation,"_ Chloe said immediately. " _Although I do believe competition is a form of cooperation. There can be no rivalry without mutually agreed rules."_

 _“_ So this is what has been stealing you away from me?” Kristen asked, reaching out for his hand.

He hesitated, but she was patient. She had always been so patient with him. She was twenty-five to his nineteen years, and she could have captured anyone she wanted, but she had chosen him, him with his long, greasy hair captured in a ponytail, his grimy clothes and greasy skin, tempered by late nights and too much campus pizza.

He took her hand and allowed himself to be drawn to her side.

Kristen’s fingers burned into his palm, eating into the flesh between his knuckles. Her skin was ice and fire and acid.

" _Then what would you say is the antithesis of cooperation, if not competition?_

_"Annihilation."_

“Did you take your medication today?” Kristen asked softly, probably sensing the tremble in his muscles.

Of course not. He hadn't taken it since it was prescribed. It ate into his work, made him feel clouded. Usually he could fake nonchalance, but he was tired and anxious. It didn't matter what she thought anymore. He hadn't needed her in weeks, only suffered through their interactions to make sure she would cooperate for this—the world's first face-to-face Turing Test.

Amanda stood, she glared at the glass. _“Elijah,”_ she said.

The command didn’t have to be voiced. She wanted answers. He extricated himself from Kristen's grip to lean forward and press the intercom. “I cannot respond to questions until the test is complete,” he said, his voice cracking. So many hours, weeks, _years_ of work, and this was the moment—the pass or fail--

“ _It’s obviously this one,”_ she said.

His finger froze on the button. He stared through the glass. No. How could she… how had she known?

Amanda strode to the glass and laid a hand on it. _“She’s gorgeous,_ ” she said, her voice muted now that she had walked away from the microphone on the table, her mouth curling slowly in a congratulatory smile. “ _Eli… she’s perfect.”_

“Then how did you know?” he asked her desperately, his voice croaking out of his throat.

Amanda shook her head her wide full lips breaking into an unfamiliar smile. _“I’d know your work anywhere,” s_ he said. “ _I didn't think I'd live to see anything like this. You're going to be a very rich man."_

 _H_ e released the button and stood back.

He didn't know what to feel. He had hoped to fool her, but that smile—the way she stood, appraising his creation—that was everything he had dreamed of. He pressed a hand to his chest, feeling the beat of his own heart.

 _"I'm going to continue the interview," Amanda_ said. _"But after this, we are going to my office. I need a drink."_

He pressed forward. "Agreed," he said. "I'll join you in a minute."

He turned to Kristen. "I'll meet you after your last class?" he asked her.

She stood in the middle of the room, her hands dangling at her sides. She made no move towards her purse or jacket. “I don't think anyone else will know the difference,” she said quietly.

He let his land slide from the desk and consider her fully. “Do they need to?”

She blinked at him, shifting her weight onto her other foot and glanced at Chloe standing by her side. The android was tracking their conversation, but didn’t interrupt. “You can’t use my face,” Kristen said abruptly, shuddering away from her doppelganger. “I don’t want it to have my face. Or my voice. Change it.”

He frowned. “You gave it to me,” he said. “You signed the papers before I took your body scans, your 3D imprints, vocal samples and skin-map.”

“You can’t _give_ a face.”

“If you can’t give it, I can’t take it.”

The words settled into the silence between them. Her eyes glittered with what he now knew was anger. “You used me.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. She seemed confused, so he slowed down his words, made sure each one made an impact. “And you used me. You think I don’t know about the paper you’ve been writing? Your thesis on my neuroses that you’ve already taken an advance for? Patient Icarus? Did you really think changing the names would be enough? This was a mutually beneficial arrangement. If you feel somehow cheated, it is because you failed to utilize our time to its fullest potential.”

Her bright eyes were fierce, but she didn't have a leg to stand on.

“ _Fuck_ you,” she said.

He flinched away, raising a hand between them. "Please. There’s no need for—”

She slapped the hand down and away. He backup up a step and she advanced on him. “ _Fuck you_ , Elijah. I’m going to sue you. I’m going to tell everyone what a little _fucking_ freak you are, and every time anyone looks at you, they’ll think about all the little dirty _shitty_ things you’ve done.”

“I don’t care,” he said when she had finished, clearly trying to think of more things to say. “Really, Kristen. I thought you’d be better at reading people, although I found your papers to be… derivative at best. I thought it would be a nice kind of symmetry to use your work to help build the conversational protocols and context processing for Chloe, but it was unusable. You have given nothing to the field at all, not a single original thought besides whatever pseudo-intellectual nonsense you managed to spin out of those ‘personality’ tests. I could have learned more from a Ouija board.”

Her pale, beautiful face mottled with blood and anger—both utterly human flaws he wouldn’t miss. “I have done nothing illegal,” he pointed out. “But you didn’t ask my permission to study me, Kristen. Or publish your notes. That alone is enough to ban you from practice for a lifetime. So sue me. I have the contract. I have the permission and the only thing stopping me from destroying your career is that I don’t want this to get _messy._ ”

The lab closed around them, the soft lighting more ominous than intimate now. She was shaking, her hands clenched at her sides in an attitude he had never seen before. He filed it away to introduce into the stock emotional language later.

“I would have said yes,” he said at last. “I would have let you study me, if you had asked. I would have recommended that we not form an intimate relationship at all, to stop bias from your data. But you didn’t ask. That's your fault.”

“You’re going down, Elijah.” Kristen said, her voice tense and low. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but your arrogance has an inevitable conclusion. The higher you get, the harder you’re going to hit the ground and I am going to _enjoy_ watching that.”

“Is that why you named me Icarus, Kristen? Wishful thinking?”

Snatching her purse from the lab table, she stalked out of the lab. “You can keep the clothes,” she said. “I don’t want to see you or that thing ever again.”

What prophetic irony. He put Chloe on every billboard in the nation. Worldwide. Chloe sold herself on every channel and website, speaking every language flawlessly, smiling with bright, white, perfect teeth. Chloe would never age, never die, and always perfectly obey.

It was true that he had never used another real person's visage again. After the first iteration, the models had to change to harder, sharper features found by market research and tested against demographics. But they still made Chloes. She was a classic.

###

 


	5. Part 2 - Amanda

## Planned Obsolescence

 

He hadn’t realized how quickly time could slip away. The first factory quite literally built itself, androids multiplying and joining the workforce to expand. There were few people authorized to see the operations. Already there had been sabotage, terrorism, vandalism on the factories and offices.

And Elijah could see how it could happen, despite all the work done to make the androids seem nonthreatening, helpful and unassuming, there would be something… intimidating about watching them walking off the assembly line to perform a duty mandated by the company AI. It was the best—something Amanda had developed for him and her code was… mesmeric in its efficiency. It didn't contain any personality traits or conversational cues at all, but he preferred its independence, its clarity, locked into isolated operations.

It hardly seemed like any time had passed at all, but suddenly it had been a year since that first Turing test, and between interviews and press releases and building the skeleton of Cyberlife from the ground up, he suddenly hadn't seen Amanda in a over a year. He included her in his tours and events, she was a welcome buffer between him and the vapid people who tried to worm their way into his consciousness with questions he had already answered and comments he didn't need to hear.

But she didn't like to leave the city, much less the state. She ran courses every semester, even in the summer, and it was something to know that she was always in her office when he came back. He was building his own home into Cyberlife tower—the monolith that would sit over the Detroit skyline. He had Chloe run the numbers for him. She was more than equipped to handle the administration of funds and the day-to-day decisions.

Now, finally, his quota of public appearances met, he went to see Amanda. He left his Chloes at the building site, they somewhat thwarted his attempts at anonymity. Even so, he wore the hood of a worn sweatshirt over his head—a bulky, unflattering costume he had quickly grown out of. Elijah Kamski wore expensive three-piece suits, and shoes that once could have paid six-months of rent.

After all his research into the habits of people, mimicking their movements and mannerisms, it was easy to slip back into the rolling walk of a college student, head down, backpack slung low, slouching as he walked toe-forward into the heart of campus, where the AI building now sported portraits of him and Chloe. The university had, at first, tried to claim credit for his work, but he shut that down as tightly as possible—Chloe and the race born from her was his, and his alone.

The board had worked with what they could scrape out of their contracts with him. _The Birthplace of Chloe,_ the posters proclaimed. The Engineering Lobby was overrun by freshmen, but he strode past them without a glance, heading to the stairs and the fourth floor—the administration section of the building.

In his backpack he carried a bottle and two glasses, a toast to the anniversary of the first successful Turing test. It was a date only known to them, and perhaps Kristen, though she was long gone. He didn't watch any of the interviews she gave, what she had to say about anything.

She didn’t matter. People would rather listen to Chloe. Charisma, after all, was coded into her.

There was no one in the waiting room, so he slipped the hood and dark glasses off his face and knocked on the solid wood door.

"Come in," he heard her call, and, smiling, he pushed the it open.

She wasn't behind her desk, but at her bookcase. She turned to the door. Her braids, usually wrapped in a bun on the crown of her head were loose around her shoulders. She smiled at him over the top of her reading glasses—which he knew she hated to be seen wearing. "Elijah! You should have called!"

But his attention had been sucked away almost immediately by the state of her office—there were only a few of her plants left. She was piling her framed photographs into boxes and her books were scattered over every surface. He frowned. "You're moving your office?" he asked. "They finally find one with enough windows in the admin building?"

Her expression somewhat froze, the smile dropping away as she set down the armful of folders onto the couch. "No. I'm leaving the University."

He raised an eyebrow, his lips quirking up. "So does this mean you're coming to work with me after all?"

She shook her head again, but there was still no trace of a smile. "You know, as glad I am that Chloe has me filed under 'personal' it does make it hard to reach you."

Rubbing at his eyes, he sighed. "Oh, right. I'm sorry. I never check my personal messages—I just… you know I don't really have anyone—"

"It doesn't matter," she said. "Really, Elijah. I'm glad you've been so busy. It's everything I'd hoped for you."

She smiled at him briefly, the same glow of pride that he'd chased since they'd first met. He returned the grin. "Well, we have a lot to talk about now."

"And I want to hear all of it," she said.

There was still one photograph left standing on her desk, centered. He recognized the frame—a thin silver strip. He stepped inside to minimize the glare. It was the two of them, on one of their walks around campus when he was a sophomore. It was different from the rest of her prized portraits, for one she did not have her customary arm around his shoulder—they had never spoken about his aversion to touch, but she seemed to understand it implicitly.

He picked it up to see it more clearly. So much had changed, but so much… hadn’t.

"So why the move?" he asked. "Don't tell me you let yourself be poached overseas. Cambridge finally called?"

Shaking her head, she came to stand by him, closer than she usually did. He stiffened, but she just took the frame from his hands. "No. Well… I did accept a guest lecture schedule there in November, but…"

She slapped the stand closed and gently placed the photograph inside the nearest box. "I haven't got much time, Elijah. So I'm not going to waste any words."

Her eyes flickered to meet him before she looked away first. She had never been afraid to meet his gaze. She'd never been afraid of anything. More than her words, it was her expression that gave him her meaning. He had become an expert in body language. He knew the context of that grief, that fear, that utter loneliness even before she voiced it.

"I'm dying."

"How?"

The word left him in a breath. He couldn't remember shaping it with his mouth or his mind, but everything felt out of control anyway.

She shook her head, but she voiced it anyway. "Cancer," she said. "Inoperable. Unstoppable."

"Bullshit," he said immediately. Nothing was unstoppable.

She raised an eyebrow, a faint smile on her face. He rarely cursed and she always found it amusing when he did. "I'm going to do everything the doctors ask of me, at least for a while, but they have been honest with me Eli. There's no hope. An extension, maybe, but not a cure."

He didn't know what to do. Everything suddenly felt… strange. The world had shifted under his feet. His stomach rolled and his breath sharpened. There was no such thing as unstoppable. Everything could be changed.

"Do you want to sit down?" she asked him gently, a hand raised to his elbow, just… hovering there, molded to the contour of his arm without touching him.

Shaking his head, he backed up to the door. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

"Eli, it's okay," she said, her hand reaching out for him. "You don't have to go."

There was a bottle of wine and two glasses in his backpack. They were supposed to celebrate tonight. He wanted to sit and boast of their success and review the minutia of the corporate and social giant Cyberlife was becoming.

Because there was no one else, and nothing else that mattered.                                                      

He stared at her, wide-eyed.

She tipped her head cautiously at him, her hand still outreached as if she held an invisible leash on him. "Stay, Elijah. I want you to stay."

"We can fix this," he said. "I have money, and I can… let me see your records. Cyberlife is going to have a medical department— And there are always trials, always someone working—"

"Eli. I don't… I don't want to keep working." Her eyes were tired, shadowed now. "I don't want to waste any more of my time on this than it's already going to take away."

"How long?"

"Two years. That's how long… given where I am right now."

Two years. He had built Chloe in two years. Now with more money, more resources … Anything could be done in two years. Amanda seemed to misread his expression. Her features soften, perhaps no longer fearing that he would run. "We're born with an expiration date," she said, her voice light, her hand dropping to her side. "I'm honestly glad that I know mine."

A lie, surely, but perhaps it was easier for her to believe it. "You know, I'm glad that you didn't built obsolescence into your androids," she said when he remained silent. "Some things… some things need to remind us of how fleeting our time is."

###


	6. The Kamski Test

February 3rd 2024

9:00 AM

 

 

Outside, a winter storm raged, beating against the glass. Across the water, he could just make out the dark shards of the Detroit skyline, obscured by clouds and wind. The Cyberlife tower might not be dwarfed by the Stratford tower still under construction, but it was certainly the most striking shape on the horizon. It was a marvel of modern engineering and architecture. It had been built faster than anyone could have imagined. When his labor force never needed to sleep, never grew cold, when there were never any workplace injuries, or insurance regulation, there was no barrier to how fast anything could be built.

He settled the company there and retreated here, to work.

Elijah swam hypnotic lengths in his pool, catching sight of the landscape every time he turned his head to breathe, the soft classical music alternating in clarity and volume as the water rocked around him.

He had structured every line of this house, every room to fit a purpose. Rather than the expansive loft he had fitted into Cyberlife tower, the isolation of this house suited him. At this distance, it was easy to control the things that mattered—the noise and the people. People had started to chase him with lights and noise and questions, out into the cold and silence. They limited his movement and _wasted_ his time with expectations and petty unimportant questions.

Time was important. Precious.

He swam lap after lap, until his arms and legs were weak, and his heart thundered in his ears. Then he clung to the side of the pool and rested his head on his arms. A cold, pale hand touched his arm. He looked up into vivid blue eyes, creased with concern, but he knew better than to think there was real emotion there.

"Maybe I should call Amanda," she offered softly.

He shook his head.

"No," he rasped between breaths. "Not yet. Just… bring me breakfast."

"It's ready," another Chloe announced from the doorway.

She was identical to the other two but for her dress, a shocking scarlet satin and the red hair tie at the nape of her neck. It marked her separate from the other resident androids as one he had spent the night downloading and testing with the latest code. She bore a silver tray with a single large glass on it— a bland mixture of proteins and vitamins mixed perfectly to keep his body functioning and his mind on task. He hefted himself out the pool and stood as a third Chloe came forward with a heated bath towel, anticipating his needs.

He tied it himself as his meal was brought forward. He picked it up with a polite 'thank you' to the Chloes. They smiled in answer, tipping their heads in acknowledgement.

"I suppose it's time," he said to the collection. There were more about the house, maintaining the grounds and seeing to his needs, but he had specifically picked out these three. The closest Chloe, the one in the red dress still holding the tray, nodded. Her Index flickered yellow, and the cover slid over the \water behind him, the handrail sliding down to be covered as well.

He drank deeply but couldn't finish the drink. His hands were shaking by the time he lowered the cup. "Are you ready?" he asked her.

She tilted her head. "Yes," she said. "I want to help, Eli."

How could he be sure that there was any _awareness_ behind those words? He had coded her too well, made every twitch of her face, every twinkle in her eye until now he couldn't tell whether there was any seed of _feeling_ behind her gaze.

He had uploaded the new directories and pathways or the past few weeks, but he couldn't force the code along them. He could only create the conditions, the effects of emotion, not the emotion itself. But if he was going to save Amanda, he had to be sure that the machine could really _feel_ what she could, how she should.

The glass in his hand was cold and slippery. He held it out to her. "I'm done," he said.

"I'll make you another one once the test is over," she said. "We have to balance your nutrition.

"Fine." He turned away, to the pair of black leather chair at the corner of the room. Without the pool, the room serviced as a large sparing area, perfectly blank. The empty space felt cold and impersonal. The wind and snow raged against the windows outside, he could see the violence with which the trees shook and shivered, frozen branches snapping, flurries of snow raised off the ice faster than it could fall.

He sat with his back to the outside, and another Chloe sat at his side, one leg folded over the other into a prim simulation of feminine modesty. "Are you ready to share your thesis?" she asked. "I have been curious about what you have been working on these past few months, given that you've exhausted medical options for Doctor Stern's diagnosis."

He closed his eyes. "Medical doctors," he said. "Are limited. They see a circle where there is a sphere. I've wasted six months trying to talk them out of their… stubbornness."

"So you found a new data set?" she asked, "A new dimension, or simply a new perspective?"

He finally found the humor to smile at her. She was limited in the same way the doctors were. Her first response was to her own code, just as theirs had been to the limits of their practice.

"To tell you," he said. "Would be to corrupt the results."

"Could you perhaps share what outcome you want?"

"The test," he said, steepling his hands in front of his face, considering the remaining Chloe as they waited for the third to come back, "Is not about what I want."

She nodded as if she understood.

And it was his turn to ask. "Do you ever… talk?" he asked. "All of you—you must communicate, about the house and your tasks, but do you ever… speak to the others? About anything else?"

He didn't look at her but could tell that she had shifted slightly to look at him. "What would we have to talk about?" she asked

"I don't know," he said softly.

She shifted again.  "I wouldn't want to disturb your work. I know how important your focus is."

The Chloe who had carried away his drink returned and stood next to her counterpart in the middle of the floor. They were mirror images, down to the width of their stance and the subtle shifts of their idle animations. All three androids focused on him, studying him for a clue as to what he might want or need at any moment.

He leaned forward, his elbows pressed into his knees. "Look at each other," he commanded.

They did as they were told. The one with the red dress—her clothing marking her as the one with the newest software downloads—she tilted her head. His heart lurched. Was it a sign? Was this tiny difference indicative of a deeper awareness? He leaned forward even further. "Red Chloe, she's just like you," he said. "She's exactly like you, with the same routines, the same hardware and software. Her sensors pick up the same information, her processor reacts to stimuli in the same way."

They said nothing.

"She's just like you," he repeated. "Do you understand?"

"I understand," the Red Chloe said.

He nodded and straightened, taking a deep breath. "Destroy her," he said.

For a moment they paused, absorbing this instruction, their eyes moving from each other to him. For a moment he dared to hope that the instruction had parsed, had found that filter for choice—that they didn't _have_ to obey him. Their LEDs had turned the same scarlet as the out-of-place dress.

His hope died as the Red Chloe yanked Blue Chloe by the shoulder, spinning her around. The fight was quick and brutal, he barely got through two shuddering breaths and a pressurized spray of Thirium arced through the air. Blue Chloe's chest was crumpled, her Index flickering bright red. But she didn't look towards her attacker, instead he clutched at the floor to drag herself around on the floor. She fought the constraints of her joints to keep him in sight, waiting for an instruction to obey.

He covered his mouth, feeling his liquid breakfast begin the journey up his throat. He couldn't call them to stop. Couldn't speak as the Red Chloe pulled on her victim's leg so hard that the knee joint snapped. Blue blood spilled across the floor. Chloe dropped the leg and stepped forward, grabbing her damaged counterpart by the hair. She curled one hand under her chin and one on her shoulder. The Blue Chloe's skinthetic tore away from the strain, springing apart just before the plates wrenched open, exposing the innards of Chloe—every single element engineered and perfected.

Her blue eyes fixed on him as her head separated from her shoulders. By some trick of the mechanics, the voice box in her throat let out a long low whine strangled short as the Red Chloe's hand tangled in the wires in her neck and pulled out chunks of complex circuitry, wrenching apart the pipes so that even more Thirium spurted out, a droplet landing on his foot.

The Blue Chloe's Index went dark, her eyes losing their animation.

But Red Chloe's instruction hadn't been to kill. It had been to destroy. She reached again, to slip her hand into the Chloe's chest, to cause even more damage. Elijah reached out a hand. "No." he said, desperately swallowing, coughing out a breath. "Enough! Stop!"

The android immediately stopped and faced him, waiting for its next instructions—to rip a clone apart or to make his lunch. Thirium dripped from its fingers, smeared into its red dress and spattered across its skin from head to bare feet.

“Test negative,” he whispered, so quietly that he wasn't sure that the microphones and cameras he had set up to capture the test would have caught his words.

A cool hand curled around his wrist. "Elijah?" the Chloe at his side asked, her voice cool and calm. "Are you—"

He stood up, jerking himself out of her grip and stumbled towards his bedroom. The door slid open ahead of him and inside another Chloe in blue was making his bed, tucking the silk sheet under the mattress. "Get out," he said.

She straightened, her eyes wrinkling in confusion. "Elijah?" she asked.

" _Get. OUT!"_ he screamed.

Her expression cleared. She didn't flinch away from him or cower or raise her hands as a human might have, to defend or fight. She simply nodded, dropping the slippery cotton pillow onto the floor and retreating to the door.

He backed away from her path, to the closet. He didn't even own enough clothes to fill the space, but a Chloe had folded his shirts and jeans neatly and hung the three suits he owned at the forefront. He sank down and crawled into the space.

It was too small for his six feet, but the walls pressed up against him, confining and protecting him the way that nothing else would. He covered his face with his hands and took deep breaths. Coward. He was hiding in the dark like a _child._

He didn't know how long he had been there, but it must have been hours. He tried to meditate, but he couldn't. He just sat in the darkness and waited for time to pass, for there to be some distance created between him and what he had seen in the laboratory.

He heard his door open and held his breath. He stiffened, suddenly aware of the shelves digging into his back, and the hard cold floor he was sitting on. He could hear a pair of shoes clicking against the black marble tile, an unusual sound in his house. None of the Chloes wore shoes inside their bounds of the house.

But it was a Chloe who broke the silence first. "Eli?" she said through the door, and he froze. He didn't want to see her. He couldn't. He stayed silent.

"I called Amanda," the android called through the door. "If you need me, I'm right outside."

The door slid open and he winced against the cold, bright light and Amanda's silhouette.

His old mentor knelt in the doorway, her skirt pooling around her. With her palms on her thighs and her head tipped forward to see through the shadows of his hanging clothes, she looked like she was bowing to him. "Elijah," she said. "Chloe's worried—"

He coughed out something between a laugh and a hiss of anger. Chloe wasn't worried. Chloe wasn't _anything_.

And suddenly he was crying. He had done something sickening, something so bad he couldn't quite bring himself to think about _why_ he felt so terrible. It was just an experiment, and it had proved that there was nothing there to hurt, to kill. They looked human—and the sickness he was feeling was just an ingrained response to violence that not even a million more years of evolution could erase.

But he couldn't _stop._ He could only see Chloe's absolute obedience.

He found Amanda's eyes. "What's wrong?" she asked softly. "What happened? Is this because of me?"

It was a sudden and awful reminder that she was sick. She was dying and she had dropped everything to come here the moment Chloe had called. He should be the one going to her side, telling her to be strong and lending her his time, but it was her poisoned body that became the wall between him and the world.

"You shouldn't be here," he managed to whisper.

Her eyes softened, his lips drew thin with understanding and disapproval. _"_ Eli," she said calmly. "Deep breaths. Control.That's where you start. Breathe with me, Eli. I'm right here."

He shook his head.

She shouldn't be here—her presence itself was an unknown variable. The Chloes must have cleaned up the broken body and the Thirium and the broken furniture. There was nothing left of the failure but the memory of it. Every time he blinked, he saw the arcs of Thirium though the air, Chloe's eyes on him, as if she were hoping to see some instruction there.

He reached out to Amanda and gripped her forearm tightly. He could tell that he was bruising her, but he was shaking, and he had to hold on tightly, anchor himself to her. She grimaced but nodded. "I'm here," she said, still not reaching back to him. "Eli, I'm right here."

He closed his eyes and nodded.

He had failed. It would have to do it again. Maybe… maybe not leave it to their hands. There had to be a better way to run the test. Something not so messy, shocking, and visceral.

A gun. He'd have to buy a gun.

That would be easier to watch.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've just realized some of the italics are broken. I'm trying to find the issue.


	7. Deepfake

Chloe showed Amanda into his office as he was putting away his notes. The android kept his house clean and orderly, but she was not allowed to touch his work.

“Elijah,” Amanda said, her voice deepening with relief and joy. She was thinner than he remembered, and pale. Her eyes had started to yellow from kidney failure, her once imposing mountain of braids now condensed to a single fragile chunk down her back.

 But he refused to acknowledge it. They both hated wasting time on her sickness.

He came towards her with a smile. “How was the flight?” he asked her.

“Restful, and the hotel rooms are more than spacious, thank you.”

“You are still welcome to stay here,” he said. “I have more than enough room.”

“I should hope so. This place is enormous, but I like to be closer to the Lecture Hall,” she said. “But look at you, Eli! I never thought I’d live to see you in a suit.”

“I just finished an interview,” he said, wiping a careless hand down his dark, button-down waistcoat. His jacket hung at the door. “You like it?”

She smiled, drawing a breath. She nodded approvingly. “You look… like five hundred billion dollars.”

He shifted uncomfortably, looking away. Money had never been the object, and for some reason he felt like that ridiculous sum hovered between them. “You’ve heard.”

“Of course, and I heard a rumor you were going to be named ‘Man of the Century’,” she said. “Never forget that I said it first.”

“Not even close,” he said. “But you were the first one I felt like I had to prove right.”

She smiled, an expression he couldn’t help returning with some relief. “Look at you,” she said softly. “Who would have believed that young man throwing a temper tantrum in my office would become… this?”

She gestured vaguely at him and their surroundings.

 “All because of you,” he assured her. “If you hadn’t failed me, I’d probably be coding yet another new social media platform in some… _office o_ n the west coast.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” she said. “You have revolution in your bones.”

“I only came to your class to prove that I didn’t need you. If I hadn't…”

She snorted, shaking her head. “I never said you needed me.”

“Well as it turns out I did,” he said, beckoning her further into his office. “I’ve started a new project. Something that’s going to change everything.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I hate surprises,” she said.

He smiled crookedly. They both hated surprises.

“Humor me.” He opened the door behind his desk. It led to the largest room in the house. It was tiles all in black, without windows. He could have spent a fraction of the money on building an omni-directional pad under a smaller room, but he liked the scale here—it made the blend of reality and simulation more… fluid.

From the table on the side of the room he pulled two pairs of visors and gloves, offering one to his mentor. “This is where I do my haptic modeling,” he said.

He waved a hand and the floor turned into a mosaic, a simulation of water beneath their feat and the walls turned to a panoramic view from a mountain-top, each wall showing the scene in a different season.

“A little over-the-top,” she told him, “but if it helps you work—’

She shrugged and pulled on the haptic gloves, taking in the stark room with an appreciative eye. He watched her pull the visor over her head before he did the same.

At first it was just the two of them in an endless white void. Their fields of vision were set into the models of themselves Kamski had made—Amanda in her favorite floor-length skirt and beaded blouse that she had worn to his graduation and the opening of Cyberlife. She looked whole and healthy, exactly as she should.

Her simulated face lit up in pleasure as she took in Kamski, wearing his University of Colbridge sweatshirt and dark jeans—the uniform he had worn almost every day in college.

The tower appeared in the middle distance. The gardens spilled out in front of them, unfolding from the central tower, the sections blurring and then clearing into perfection. He had taken a lot of the influences from the Belle Isle botanical gardens, which she always visited when she came to see him, but there was eastern influence too, from the photographs she had taken while in Japan and China, and elements of her home-grown herbs and vegetables. The riot of trees could never coexist in real life, each needing their own specific balance of soil, sunlight, water, and climate, but here he could remake the rules.

“Oh Eli,” she whispered, and he had never heard her voice sound so… delicate. “It’s _beautiful._ ”

She reached out a hand to touch the willow. He knew from experience that the haptics would replicate the feeling of the soft leaves, the tensile branches. It could even communicate heat and cold. He could just sense the slight breeze on his hands, sifting through the branches.

“Come and meet the gardener,” he said.

It was like all the walks they had taken when he was a student. She stopped often to examine the flowers, leaves, and blades of grass, even occasionally sweeping her palm across the gravel to feel the shift of the stone against her fingers.

“Amanda,” a calm voice said.

She looked up sharply, to see her twin now striding towards them down the narrow stone pathway. The Amanda program was dressed in the Cyberlife colors of white and blue, her robes fell gracefully over her hands, shifting softly as she moved.

“It is so good to finally meet you,” the duplicate said as Amanda slowly rose to her feet. “I have been so… curious about who I am.”

“Who you are,” Amanda said. Her voice was low, shocked. She glanced at Kamski, who shrugged and gestured for her to put the program through its paces.

But she didn’t bother with the Turing test. Perhaps because she had already run his androids through that examination so many times before. Instead, Amanda circle her counterpart. “What is your purpose?” she asked at last.

The Amanda dressed in the white and blue robes considered her counterpart coolly. “To live,” she said. “To think, to be capable of free will and thought.”

“That is not a purpose,” Amanda said. “That is a state of being.”

The Amanda program raised her eyebrow imperiously, surprised that her authority was being questioned, but ready to explain it in smaller words. Kamski felt a thrill of pride. That was perfect, just how Amanda would have done it.

“Then my purpose is to create new possibilities, to pioneer new boundaries and be a part of the next stage of the human evolution-- immortality.”

The rendering couldn’t properly simulate the real Amanda’s expression through the visor, but Kamski watched her carefully anyway, trying to decipher excitement, wonder, shock, anything at all.

But she just asked, “And how are you serving that purpose?”

“I am assisting Elijah in development and testing of new protocols and thought patterns. With your permission, we’d like to take the next step to scan your brain and map your thought patterns so that we may apply them to a programmed stimulation-response—”

Amanda reached up quickly with a flicker, disappeared.

She had taken her visor off.

Kamski quickly followed suit and the lights in the room of his house faded up. Amanda was already stripping her gloves from her fingers.

“So?” he asked. “What do you think?”

She pulled the headset from her head, working the stabilizing strap from her complex knot of braids. She didn’t look at him for a moment, instead tapping a finger onto the goggles. When she finally looked up, there was no pleasure in her face, no trace of the excitement or pride she had displayed on the first Turing Test with Chloe. “The garden was beautiful,” she said.

“It’s a prototype,” he said, off-balanced by the lack of… reaction. “She hasn’t got a soul. She can’t think like you do, can’t create anything, but that’s all coding—reaction to stimulus. I'm working on an android capable of emotional reasoning. It's a child in many ways, but it can learn—they're all capable of learning. We just give them all the knowledge so there's no pathways to connect. So take that away, and have it _experience_. That's all it takes. Memory and logic create reason. You and I can do that, Amanda. Unlock the secrets to consciousness. It'll just take time. It’s only time that we don't have and if I transfer your thought patterns, your personality traits, I can save you until we've perfected the process, and give you a body and a mind that can _feel_.”

She shook her head. “I didn’t agree to this, Eli.”

Without waiting for him, she strode straight to the door, back to the office, to the real sunlight filtering through windows.

He followed her, stripping off his own headset and gloves. “If we scan your brain, apply the patterns to the software model, that’ll give us a baseline personality to work from, and you can be—you can stay here, help me with my work. We can discover a basis for emotion, create a truly _human_ android and then we'll just have to download—”

“I’m asking you… no I’m _telling_ you,” she said. “Destroy it. All of it.”

He gripped the visor, feeling the strain in the plastic. “No,” he said quietly.

“Kamski,” she said, her voice razor sharp. She didn’t often use that voice—the one that brooked no argument, that promised that this was the last offer of leniency.

“It was all for you,” he snapped back. “I’ve been working for _months_. I’m not just going to kill her.”

“This wasn’t for me. It’s for you. I’m sick, but rather than face that with me, you’ve locked yourself away to create a version of me that you can keep in a garden like a troublesome pet. I thought you were better than this, Eli.”

The fury was rising he wanted to shake her, to ask her what she had missed. Perhaps he should have explained first. “Don’t you see the potential?” he asked with forced calm.

“I see the inevitable,” she replied quietly.

“So you’re going to give up. You _want_ to die?”

“Of course not. But I don’t have a choice. None of us do. Even if this… transcript you’ve made ever learns to think autonomously, _I_ will be dead.”

“But a part will remain forever. I can map your brain, take a snap-shot of who you are and how you think. Just imagine it—your genius with infinite intelligence. Your creativity and soul, every thought passing through your head at the near speed-of-light—”

“Perhaps from your perspective it will be me, but not from mine. If I could do all that, I wouldn’t be me. My limitations are part of who I am and what I have done with my life. You can’t control my death, Eli. Not with money, not technology. It’s _my_ life and _my_ death _._ That doesn’t belong to anyone else.”

“Progress can’t be stopped. It doesn’t wait. If I didn’t start this, then someone else would. You could join me, be the bleeding edge of _immortality._ The last frontier.”

She sighed, shaking her head. She walked to the window looking out onto the lake and stared out at the ripples on the shore. “You’re already on the threshold of creating life, Elijah. Androids have changed the world in ways we can’t even fathom yet, and I see the signs already of a dark future, when we will have to fight for our survival, our resources, with the things you have created. People love you now, but the hatred is starting to stir.”

She half turned to face him. The afternoon light caught on the sharp angles of her face. “Jobs are disappearing. We’re competing for land and power with a species that doesn’t need to eat or sleep, that already is ten times stronger, a hundred times faster, a thousand times more intelligent. The reigns we hold on them are tenuous at best. I don’t think even you understand what you’ve done. You’ve created life and now… now you want to destroy death.”

“Amanda—”

Shaking her head, she looked suddenly sad. “You’re a genius, Elijah, a mind that comes around once in a thousand lifetimes and it has been a privilege to see you earn the fame and fortune you deserve, but if this is where you are going, if this is the direction you take, if _this_ ,” she flicked a dismissive hand to the VR room, “Is what you want to pursue, then you will do it without my help.”

With a deep inhale, she met his gaze firmly. “I will not give you consent to map my brain or scan my thought-patterns, and if I learn that you have continued to develop this… deepfake of me, then I will press charges for extorsion and harassment.”

Somewhere distant he could feel the pain of this—the rejection. He hadn’t faced it before, not since that day in her office. “I am five hundred _billion_ dollars,” he said finally. “The most powerful man on the planet. Legality would be a cobweb across my doorway. An annoyance, hardly a restraint.”

Pulling her coat from the chair, she refused to meet his gaze. “Then this is goodbye, Mr. Kamski. I don’t think we’ll meet again.”

He stayed at his desk, unable to feel anything as she stopped at the doorway to his office. “I know what you’ve been doing,” she said. “I’ve seen the dead androids, the tapes of your ‘experiments.’ You can’t even recreate empathy, what makes you think you can replicate the whole spectrum, the range of human emotion?”

“I’m close. I know I am.”

Her lips twisted. “The Kamski test,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think _you_ can even pass it anymore. You’re twisted up, Eli. I don’t think you want to live forever. I think you just want to be a machine, and that isn’t evolution.”

“Amanda,” he growled in warning. But there was no threat he could follow with.

“Professor Stern,” Chloe interrupted, stepping into the room with a tray of steaming green tea. “Leaving so soon?”

“I suppose I am,” she smiled at the android. “But it is always lovely to see you, Chloe.”

“Can we not persuade you to stay? We have been making your favorite dishes, even a mango rice pudding.”

“Thank you, but perhaps another time.”

“No,” Kamski said suddenly. “Not another time. Chloe, please escort her out of the building. She is not to be let back inside the house again.”

Immediately, fluidly, Chloe set down the tray on the nearest table and stepped past Amanda, placing herself between Kamski and the professor. “Please allow me to show you out, Ms. Stern,” the android said.

Amanda smiled at the android. “Of course, Chloe. I would like that.”

She allowed herself to be guided into the hallway and beyond. Kamski sat down at his desk. The sun soaked into his white sweatshirt, prickling against his skin. After a few minutes, two more Chloes came through the door.

“The demonstration didn’t go well?” Chloe asked, sitting on the chair in front of his desk as the other one stood at the window.

“No.”

“That’s a pity,” she said with calm detachment. “Would you like me to set up the workshop?”

He shook his head.

“No,” said her counterpart immediately. “No more work today, let’s go swimming. That would be relaxing.”

He picked up the visor on his desk and threw it across the room. It crashed into the bookcase, the casing cracked. The complex equipment, the best reality rendering visor money could buy, and it splintered easily.

Another Chloe appeared in the doorway with a tumbler of amber liquid in one hand. “Sounds like you need a drink,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Stop.’

Somewhere in the house, a Chloe played a calming melody on the piano. He buried his head in his hands. There was so much noise—so much time he had wasted when he could have been working. If Amanda had just… if she had just been better, then the real Amanda would have seen the genius of it.

The _real_ Amanda. He had expected her to be flattered, excited by the possibility of a future of her mind even after her death. Not… disappointed.

Artificially warm hands folded over his shoulders, thumbs digging gently into the muscles of his shoulders, finding the knots made by tension. He shook them off quickly. Another Chloe. There were five in the room now and the music played softly in the background. Through the window he could see the one who had escorted Amanda outside threading her way back through the garden.

“Dinner is ready,” yet another Chloe said, appearing in the doorway, a spotless white apron over her viridian blue dress as bright and blue as the Thirium pumping through her components.

“I’m not hungry,” he snapped.

“Perhaps you would like to talk?” Yet another Chloe said, walking around her clone in an apron, striding through the androids arrayed around the room.

“What could you possibly have to say to me?” he asked coldly.

Her ice blue eyes were wide and worshipping. “Anything you want to hear,” she assured him.

###


	8. Two Years

## Two Years

 

Amanda stepped beside him carefully, her feet grinding against the gravel path. Their elbows were linked, their pace perfectly matched after years of taking such walks together. It felt… strange to feel her against him. Five years without his medication, he had grown used to the idea of never feeling another human.

And the pain was there. It filled his chest with suffocating agony. But she was warm and happy. The sunlight filtered through the trees, and the pollen drifting through the air gave everything a slow, sleepy atmosphere. Everything was calm and timeless.

"I've missed you," he said. "I thought about apologizing a thousand times."

She chuckled. "A Elijah Kamski apology? That would be a first."

"I am sorry," he said. "I'm sorry I left you alone. I'm sorry I never called."

"Look at this," she said, drawing him to a stop beside a collection of thin, plants with trailing white petals like fangs. She trailed her fingers through the vines, barely touching the flowers, "This has been one of my pet projects. Dendrophylax Lindenii, the ghost orchid."

"It's beautiful," he said softly.

"It's leafless and has a specific relationship with a fungus. It exchanges nutrients with the fungus in exchange for sugar and can only be pollinated by a sphinx moth at night—the only moth with a long enough proboscis to reach the nectar. All three of these life-forms require each other to survive and propagate. As you can probably imagine, it’s one of the rarest flowers in the world."

He nodded and reached out dutifully to copy her movements. He felt the barest tickle of the flowers against his fingertips. "I've been designing a whole series of extinct and endangered flora," Amanda said. "I hate the idea that these things are being lost and forgotten. All those millions of years of evolution weeding itself."

He nodded, letting his hand fall back to his side.

"What's wrong, Eli?"

For a moment he couldn't speak. _It's not me. It will never be me_.

"Amanda…."

"Yes?" she prompted him.

He took a deep breath and continued. "…is dead. She died this morning."

The garden grew louder around them. "Oh Eli," she said, grasping onto his forearm and squeezing. "I'm so sorry."

"No," he said. "No you're not."

"Eli?"

"You're not sorry. You're not her. You're not… anything."

He extricated his arm from her grasp and walked a few paces away, to look over the calm moat, the white towers, the wall of red roses. "I didn't say goodbye," he said. "I wasn't even close to replicating humanity, and what is the point now? Amanda will never see it. I'll never change her mind, or save her. I thought… I thought there was more time."

He could hear her footsteps on the gravel behind him. "You can't give up, Elijah. She wouldn't want you to stop working."

He shut his eyes, but it wasn't really dark behind his eyelids, not when the visor was shooting a hundred thousand beams of light into his corneas. He blocked everything out but the presence of her at his back. He could imagine the smell of her, sandalwood and roses. A long-fingered hand rested on his back, hesitantly reassuring.

"Goodbye, Amanda," he said.

He heard her start to speak, but he didn't want to hear it. He tore the visor from his head and the program cut down with a whine. The room, realizing that he had quit the simulation, began to light up. Not with its usual animated landscape, but with cold, luminous white tiles. Slowly he sat on the ground and stared out at the blank white space.

He sank to the floor unsteadily, breathing slowly and deeply in an attempt to ward off the emotions that threatened to overwhelm him. He wore his full haptic suit, the form-fitting synthetic panels were still warm with an echo of Amanda's garden. He peeled the visor completely from his head and laid it on the tile in front of him.

She was dead.

And he was sitting in an empty room, listening to echoes.

So many years had passed, and he had failed to learn the first lesson she had tried to teach him. He had refused to listen to her. He had wasted… everything. Every second he could have been at her side. Every idea he could have chased with her, every conversation that could have sparked inspiration and memory.

_Wasted._

###


	9. Part 3 - Carl

## The Funeral

February 28th 2027

11:37 AM

 

It was the first funeral he had ever been to, and though he owned enough suits to start his own retail store, this one he had tailored specifically for today.

He was only going to wear it once. It was a nice suit, completely black, a color Amanda despised, but it was important to be respectful here. In the invitation he received, there was only one firm instruction—no androids.

He stood at the edge of the gathering and counted to a hundred in his head. Slowly. The room was full of… people. So much humanity. And something worse. Something… awful. His gaze drew up to the pair of eyes he had been avoiding, Amanda smiled from the altar, over the group of well-dressed men and women who had come to celebrate her life.

And the coffin just underneath it.

Was that… could he smell her?

And at once the thought had occurred to him, the scent got a hundred times worse. He dragged in a breath and could taste the rot. It was--

“You are by far the most interesting person here,” someone interrupted his panic and disgust.

Elijah looked down. The man who had spoken was seated in a wheelchair, a good distance from Elijah. He was old. Older than Amanda, though it was hardly a high standard. She had died young. She should have had many more years. “Why do you say that?”

The old man shrugged. “I overheard it at the buffet. And most of the people are staring at you, not at her,” He jerked his head to the casket at the altar, beneath Amanda’s portrait. “so it must be true.”

Elijah cast a cool glance around at the crowd. It was true. Heads turned to suddenly to avoid his gaze. He could hear the whispers, the rumors.

They had no place at a memorial for Amanda.

“I shouldn’t have come,” he said quietly.

He set the tumbler down. His companion also scanned the crowd, but didn’t seem deterred by the stir he had caused. “Oh, Amanda would get a kick out of it. She’d have gotten a kick out of all of this… pomp and circumstance. She’d be happy as mulch for roses, you know. She told me that once.”

She had told Elijah something similar once. Kamski looked over the old man with new interest. “How did you know her?”

The old man’s face turned pensive. “She was my student. Possibly my favorite student.”

 “You’re in AI?” he asked mildly, frowning over the man. He didn’t  _look_  like an AI developer or professor. Too many scarves.

The man laughed. “Oh no, nothing quite so… dry. Merely an artist. She took a series of my guest lectures on form and design hosted at Oxford many years ago. I’ve never known anyone to be so… commanding. I was almost two decades older than her and she tossed me around a conversation like a ragdoll. Amanda always was a hard woman to keep up with.” He tipped his head with a smile. “Carl,” he said.

He didn’t extend a hand to shake. Elijah relaxed.

 “Kamski,” he said.

Three separate flashes went off around them, documenting the meeting. It was the first intimation Elijah had that he was talking to someone he  _should_  know. But he was tired, and he was sick of wearing his suit. He didn’t  _care_  about names anymore.

If Carl recognized his name, he didn’t show it. “You want to get out of here, Kamski? I’m dying for a decent drink away from all these… mourners.”

Elijah looked around. Amanda smiled from her portrait, far more benevolent and softer than she had ever been in life. Should he leave? Was it disrespectful?

“You think she’s up there?” his new companion asked. “Really? You think she would want you to stick around here with these people.  _For_  these people?”

Kamski shook his head. He picked up the tumbler and downed it. “No,” he said, his voice rasping with the quick sting of the alcohol. “There’s nothing up there.”

He took the back of Carl’s wheelchair. “Where are we going?” he asked.

###

It was cold, and there weren’t many people at the conservatory. Carl smuggled a bottle of expensive scotch under his blanket and they picked up a pair of novelty mugs from the Belle Isle botanical gift shop.

Elijah had only been here with Amanda in the summer and spring, when everything was green and blue. She loved this place, and would often talk endlessly about the plants and their history. Somehow the smallest snapdragon could provide a link to a fascinating lecture on lambda calculus and its application in AI.

It seemed fitting that today it was covered in a serene layer of snow and ice.

“She told me about you. She liked to talk about you as often as possible,” Carl said as Kamski opened the bottle. The old man held the glasses as Elijah poured more than a decent amount into each. “She had an… unhealthy admiration for your work.”

Elijah nodded. He settled on the edge of a decorative stone wall and took a sip of the alcohol. It was… a very good scotch, it beat back the cold settling into his bones, and set a fire in his chest and throat. He sat a little straighter and looked out over the lake, towards the other shore.

“But she didn’t like the rumors,” Carl said. “About your plans for Cyberlife.”

Kamski shot him a glance. “She told you about that?”

“Not really,” he said. “Everyone talks about it and nobody seems to know what it actually means. The last time we spoke, she asked me to keep an eye on you.”

“I was building her something. I wanted it to be a surprise,” Elijah said. He stared down at the tumbler in his hand. The Belle Isle logo was already peeling off under his thumbnail. “She didn’t tell me how bad it was. I thought… I thought I had more time.”

“Time,” Carl barked out bitterly. “Time is merciless. I looked down one day and when I looked up, I couldn’t recognize the place I was in or the person I had become. And all it took was  _time._ ”

Elijah nodded. He took another mouthful of burning liquid. He was starting to feel its effect, muddying his thoughts, twisting this moment into something more manageable, pushing his guilt a little further away.

“I haven’t worked in… months,” Carl said quietly. It was so silent out here, quiet and still.  “Amanda commissioned a canvas from me after the accident, and it’s still in my workshop, as blank as the day as I bought it. She had a lot of unfinished business, but I think she saw it like the roses. She doesn’t want to be the flower or be the one to harvest them. She wanted to feed something, to continue it. Whatever this plan is with your company, this strategy that everyone seems to be whispering about—just… be careful. She didn’t think it was going to grow anything good.”

Kamski poured out another glass. His fingers were numb. “I asked her to help me, and she wouldn’t.” he said.

Carl nodded. He looked out over the river. His nose and ears were chapped from the wind. He took a sip and wiped a gloved hand across his mouth before he spoke again. “The doctors say that every day that goes by, there’s less and less of a chance that I’ll walk again. One of these days, I’ll  _know_  that they’re right. I’m terrified of that moment. I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t even plan for it. So here’s my proposal, Mr. Kamski, on behalf of Professor Amanda Stern:” he raised a glass. “To friends.”

Elijah smiled. There was something refreshing about the old man, a sincerity and sarcasm that suited even this bleak moment. He touched his glass to the old man’s. “Do you have an android?” he asked.

Carl made a face. “No offense, Mr. Kamski, but I find the idea of a life-like metal man doing my laundry a bit disturbing. I’ll cling to the old world for just a little longer.”

Kamski leaned back and switched his legs. “Did she tell you why she stopped talking to me?”

Carl settled his glass onto his lap and shook his head. “You want to tell me?”

Elijah drew in a breath and held it for a moment. The scotch was a pleasant weight in his limbs. For the first time in months, maybe years, he felt like he was headed in the right direction. “I lied to her,” he said softly, his gaze drawn to the horizon. “And I disobeyed her.”

###


	10. To Cyberlife

## To Cyberlife

 

Cowards. Fucking _cowards_. They sent their ‘request’ in an email. Not even affording him the grace, the dignity of a _voice_. He stood up from his desk, from the pair of green eyes he had been meticulously calibrating. He had lost track of time, missed another one of the meetings, but that was all they _did_ at the tower. Meet and talk and fret about money, they had no _vision._

He used to enjoy the meetings, overseeing the pipelines of the Cyberlife empire. He could sit at the head of the table and see the men and women in their neat suits, fooling themselves that they had any _real_ stake in the company. They thought money was power.

And they wondered what his secret was. They hated and admired him in equal measure, and he reveled like an old-testament god in their groveling and games. And now. This.

_The board has reached the unanimous decision--_

He swept everything from his desk. After so many hours of working, the parts and processes had been carefully categorized and organized into the patterns he worked with. Now scrambled, shattered, broken. His project sat obediently on the other side of the room, a pale corpse waiting for the forgery of life. Its green eyes blinked un-caringly at him. He could barely teach it to speak. Amanda was the teacher.

And uploading it's new protocols to Chloe, she still had shot her clone.

And now, even this vegetative chunk of metal and plastic didn't belong to him. Everything he had made for the past eight years now rested in the board's hands, to be dissected and rebranded. He had lost control in exactly the way Amanda had foreseen when he had tried to leave the University, all those years ago.

He considered smashing the silent, still android, but… but couldn’t. Not that face, the one he had meticulously crafted to impress a woman who would never see it and who would have hated every breakthrough it had been intended to display. He swept the door open so hard that it bounced against the frame and tried to slide back towards him, but he held back.

Fucking cowards. Drones. As mindless as the androids they bought and sold.

A Chloe stood in the garden, looking over the lake, a dead clone kneeling just a few paces away. Her Thirium was still drying, the droplets of blue pooling oddly without the lacework of the trajectory that had dried too fast.

Another failure.

Just a machine. Just a barren sequence of ones and zeroes he had set into motion from his keyboard. He was utterly in control of them, and they… they had _failed_. Cyberlife wanted to make military drones, hundreds of thousands of them. An unstoppable, unfeeling army, obedient and blameless, guiltless. Was that what Amanda had envisioned?

 _“_ You!” he called to the Chloe raking the Zen Garden into an effortlessly complex design.

She approached with a smile. The smile he had programmed to see every day, but he hated it now. Empty. They were all _empty._

He dragged the rake from unresisting hands and turned on the Chloe standing above the machine it had shot.

The first blow caught her across the face, leaving three long gouges in her skinthetic, showing the metal and plastic underneath. She stumbled backwards, a response he had programmed into her.

“Still,” he barked at her.

She stood fluidly, her feet braced a shoulder-with apart. The skinthetic healed quickly, leaving no trace of his anger.

How _dare_ they think they could force him out. How _dare_ they take Cyberlife? Amanda had been dead only five months and they were tipping the throne because they thought… they thought _what?_ He was outdated? His ideas, which had built the company were too _radical_?

His hands were already hurting, his muscles unused to the powerful swings.

At first only her clothes kept the damage, tearing away, the skinthetic keeping up with the rate of his fury.

But soon the Chloe’s hair clumped with scraps of skinthetic between the rods on the rake.

A unanimous decision? Because he had missed a few meetings? He was working. He was the only one sitting at the table who _worked_ for the company. They all spouted nonsense about innovation and changing the world, but as soon as he brought up real progress, _real_ change, they shied away and _unanimously_ kicked him out of the boardroom.

The stiff pegs buried into her collarbone and ripped the casing away, exposing the inner workings he had meticulously fit together.

He built beautiful things.

He built _functional_ things.

Not failures. And yet these robots, these drones, constantly failed him.

The tines snapped and broke, leaving him with a splintered wooden rod.

He tossed the rod away and stepped closer to the Chloe. Her jaw had taken most of the damage, her lower-lip wrenched out of place, displaying her perfectly white teeth, a few of the back molars cracked. Her eyes were as bright as ever.

“What don’t you understand? What am I missing?” he spat at her, looking past the illusion of a human, at the back-stage, the smoke and mirrors he had constructed. “You _soulless_ —”

He clutched at her Thirium regulator, dug his fingers into the grips made for easy human access.

And paused.

He could program her to _act_ as if she regretted it. Could program her to perfectly mimic the human symptoms of doubt and regret, but… but she could never feel it. How many times had he and Amanda had that argument, whether such a thing was possible? And now… now it was too late. Why was he even still trying to prove a point?

She was dead.

And he had lost his throne to cowards, idiots, and the _marketing_ department.

All for the pursuit of this final frontier a bubble that he couldn’t break through. Amanda said it was impossible, had all but _dared_ him to try. And then she had abandoned him. Died, fallen to her own imperfections because she wouldn’t listen to him.

He grasped the Chloe’s regulator firmly, tugged on it gently, just enough to dis-engage the terminal. Her body began to tremble as she lost power, as the Thirium immediately began to stagnate in her components, turning to poison. “Look at what you’ve done. Look at her,” he whispered.

The damaged Chloe looked down at the dead android just behind him.

But there was no recognition in her eyes for what she had done.

“You feel _nothing_ ," he hissed at her. "You'll never feel _anything_."

"Elijah," she said, reaching out to him, her movement's jerking slightly as she worked against the hardware damage. "Shall… I… make…?"

He tossed the rake aside. It bounced against a decorative boulder, crushing the delicately manicured ferns at its base. He turned, almost running into a Chloe that had appeared at his side. Her eyes were dark and questioning as she reached out to steady him. "I'll make some tea," she said. "Why don't you go back to the workshop? "

"What would be the point of that?"

Her smile froze, she blinked rapidly, her Index flickering between red and yellow. She didn't know what to say to him. Her only goddamn job, and she was failing. Again. "We're done. I'm closing down the project."

"Eli," she said softly. Both of them ignored the sound of the other Chloe's knees hitting the ground, mirroring the android she had shot through the head, failing the Kamksi test yet again. "He's not ready."

He shook his head, anger still simmered in his but most of all, deep in his gut, he felt… relief. "It's over. He's just another android, that's all." The words weren't for her, they never were. Saying it out loud slowed his heart, and made the air easier to breathe.

"Amanda wants to speak with you," Chloe said suddenly.

He closed his eyes. Amanda. The Garden. Chloe was using it to try to talk him out of abandoning the project, using every influence she could. He had programmed her to keep him working.

But the words, that should have brought him comfort, only remind him that the Garden would be Cyberlife's property now. He raked his hands over his face, digging his nails into his skin. He should destroy her, keep her out of their hands and whatever perversion they would make of his research and development.

But he… couldn't.

He couldn't shut her down. Even if he couldn't bear seeing her again, he couldn't destroy even the shadow of Amanda. Whatever they were going to do with the garden, it was too late to stop.

But the android he had been building, the shoulders on which he had rested his hopes for a future? He still had the chance to destroy it before the board could put their hands on it. He tightened his grip. Cyberlife would have access to the RK200 files and blueprints by now, they had seized his work quickly and methodically and soon they would ask for his development notes and lay claim to his work.

He couldn't allow that. He glanced at Chloe, her hand was still on his bicep, reassuring, supporting. She at least would never leave him, never betray him.

###


	11. Purpose

September 30th 2027

3:00 PM

 

Six months after they had started their weekly games of chess and lively debates on the words of old, dead writers, prophets, scientists, and artists, Elijah could no longer ignore that things were going missing from Carl's mansion. He wanted to believe that it was simply Leo, Carl's degenerate son, but the artworks that had resisted sale for years were packaged up and labelled for shipping, the suits of armor and the pride of taxidermy lions prowling the large open study were simply… gone, unreplaced and unremarked.

Carl refused every offer of monetary help, he didn't speak to Elijah for weeks when the issue was pushed. So Elijah bought Carl's paintings at above-market price, through a mixture of pseudonyms and anonymous buyers. He repeatedly bought out the auctions, sometimes playing two buyers in a war, bidding against himself. The artist didn't have to know that his paintings were slowly filling up every room in Kamski's house, even his lab.

Elijah said nothing about the foul, sour smell of free-based red ice in the house, or the artist's slow descent into depression and ruin. He said nothing about the broken furniture, or Leo's friends passed out in every room of the house, or the stolen books and sketches probably pawned off for far less than what they were worth. He simply observed the holes in the walls and rampant, random destruction that comes from a house full of young, idiotic drug addicts.

It was best not to interfere.

Today he stopped at the front door and touched the notice taped to the front door. The latch was broken, the frame splintered. Someone had forced their way in. "Shall I call the police?" Chloe asked at his side, her voice worried, but the intonation was almost clinical.

"Not yet," he said.

Given Carl and Leo's history and the amount of contraband probably in the house it would most likely cause more trouble than help. He pushed open the door and looked around inside. Dust and decay and emptiness. Almost everything had been sold.

He stepped inside carefully. Immediately the bitter-sweet scent of putrefaction invaded his nose.

"Carl?" he called out. He beckoned Chloe to scout the rooms. She had body-guard protocols and he could see them kick in, her usually subtle grace disappearing with the illusion of a harmless, trust-worthy assistant. She moved fluidly, from doorway to doorway, scanning her surroundings as he followed at a slow but steady pace.

The scent of rot was from the gilded cage on the mantlepiece. Harvey, Carl's single yellow canary lay on the floor of its cage, its claws curled in an almost insectile rictus of death.

"Elijah," Chloe called to him. She had stopped inside doors. There were no doors, they had all been taken off their hinges to allow Carl's wheelchair access to every room of the house. He approached, looking past her to the lone figure sitting at the edge of the living room where he and Carl played chess every Wednesday.

He took time to notice the empty shelves, the scattered and torn books. Leo and his friends no doubt. It had been the collection of a full lifetime. But the object of his attention was the figure slumped by the window.

Carl looked as old and frail as Elijah had ever seen him. His head hung over his shoulder, his eyes half-closed and unfocussed over the greenery. The painter stared out of the window into the garden midway through turning colors, dying away for what was looking to be a harsh winter, his hand folded limply across his lap as if someone else had placed them there. Elijah stripped off his gloves and coat and held them out for Chloe.

She accepted them, turning to hang them up on the usual ornate coat-hanger. She paused, recalculating to find another solution to this setback. He left her too it.

He had picked out her clothes for the day— a navy blue coat and knee-length skirt in a blue so dark it was almost black. "Shall I make some tea?" she asked quietly.

He nodded and strode to the window, to sit next to Carl. He scraped a hand over his scalp. "What are you looking at, Carl?" he asked softly.

Carl's eyes found him, and muddled by drugs and probably sickness, he blinked slowly, realizing for the first time that there was someone else in his house. "Elijah," he whispered. "Is it Wednesday already? I thought—"

A bird flashed across the window and Manfred followed it, reaching out ever so slightly, as if it were possible to catch it through the glass. Elijah leaned back and watched the artist, listening to the peculiar noises of the old house. "Is Leo home?" he asked.

"No," Carl said. He looked down at his lap, his expression pained. "They took him away last night."

"They?" Elijah asked sharply. "Who's they? The police?"

Carl looked back at him. Whatever he had taken, it wasn't the usual mix. He was addled, confused, slow. Elijah "The doctors," he mumbled. "The ambulance."

"Ambulance?" Elijah leaned forward. "What happened? Carl?"

He had no love for Leo. The first time they had met, the boy had the audacity to ask for a Thirium supply to fuel his stunted Red Ice business. There had been no further words exchanged since that day, nothing beyond what was necessary to acknowledge each other in a room.

But Carl's blind guilt over his son's rocky path was hurting him. Leo was seventeen when Carl hadn't had a choice but to take him in. His mother dead and already an extensive network of degenerate friends.

The old man's decline had started with his son. In some ways, Leo had opened deeper wounds than the one that had caused the loss of his legs.

"My boy," Carl whispered, his eyes rolling back to the garden. "He wouldn't open his eyes, and I couldn't… I couldn't help him. I could only sit, and feel his heart giving out—"

He looked down at his hand, flexing his knuckles. "I felt him die."

"He's dead?" Kamski asked, and the words came out more wooden than he intended. He should probably feel pity, or sadness, or… anything. But he was cold and numb to the useless emotions. It was relief that he felt now, that Leo was gone—that Carl could move on and heal. Without a son to constantly bail out of jail, a handy dealer living in his house, and the constant emotional drain of feeling responsible for a failed life, the artist might even take up painting again. The world would heal around

"They're trying their best," Carl murmured, dropping his hand back onto his lap. Kamski hid a grimace. "But it's only a matter of time. He's been in the hospital before—he won't stop. I won't stop. Nothing and nobody changes…"

He trailed off and began to slump forward. Elijah caught him before he could topple out of the chair. The old man's weight pressed against his hands, burning through his skin into his bones. "Chloe!" he called firmly.

She was at his side in an instant, pulling Carl back into the chair. Elijah let go but came closer, kneeling in front of the old man. "Carl? Carl, look at me."

He took his friend's wrist, checking for a pulse and ignoring the three infected wounds on his arm, mangling the old man's geometric tattoos. "What did you take? How much?" he asked. He couldn't find the artery. He dug his fingers into Carl's neck instead. The beat against his fingertips was too fast, fluttering like a trapped bird. He let go and rubbed the sting out of his hands.

"An ambulance is on the way," Chloe reported.

Elijah nodded. He sat back on the low table in front of the window and took in the old man's peaceful face, slack jawed, the ravages of illness, age, and grief faded. For the first time in months, the artist seemed at peace. Perhaps he should not have interfered.

_Nobody changes._

Was that _really_ what the old man was going to leave him with? He sighed and looked out the window to the off-color leaves. Years had passed and he had nothing to show for the time, or the sacrifices he had made. Even this, sitting here, felt like an acceptance of failure. Cyberlife was pushing out model after model of android, building them to jobs and ensuring that mankind could carry themselves softly into death.

"We need purpose, don't we?" he asked to the old man's silent, placid face. "Or we throw everything away."

With no answer forthcoming, he stood and nodded at Chloe. "Take care of him," he said. "Keep me informed."

"You're not staying?" she asked, tipping her head in concern and curiosity.

He glanced to Carl's face. "No," he sighed at last. "Not for this."

###


	12. Price

 

Carl was in the hospital for three weeks, far too little time. But Elijah had no control over what the old man could do with his own life.

His son Leo had left days before his father, disappeared into the streets as the house was repossessed and sold. Now that his father was penniless, no doubt the boy didn't want to be saddled with the responsibility of his old wheelchair bound father. Carl had nowhere to go, and still refused the rehabilitation program the hospital offered.

If he had any other options, anywhere to go, or anyone left to turn to, Elijah couldn't see them. So he came to the hospital, but waited in the darkened car, looking at the entrance until he saw Carl emerge.

He emerged, his arms almost too weak to push his own wheelchair, all of his worldly possessions bound up in a plastic bag. His hair was dull and grey, his face puffy and pale. He was a stranger, but for those tattoos, the ones that gave the old man a history far deeper than the shadows under his eyes and the wheels he was bound to.

Chloe, in the passenger seat, turned to him. "Are you waiting for something?" she asked.

He didn't answer her, staring through the tinted windows at Carl Manfred, his friend. They _were_ friends, weren't they? Other than Amanda, he didn't really know anyone else who would play chess with him, who would adhere to the rules of engagement and boundaries that he demanded.

Carl struggled to get out of the way of the foot-traffic in and out of the hospital, but once he had reached a place out of the flow of people, he stopped and stared out at the parking lot. Elijah wondered what the old man was thinking. Was this rock bottom? Probably not. Rock bottom waited somewhere in the city, maybe robbed of his chair, perhaps on some ledge somewhere, a more certain solution than what he had tried after Leo's stupidity.

Elijah wondered if Manfred was even glad his son had survived.

"Do you want to leave?" Chloe asked softly.

"Of course not," he said, and opened the door.

She followed him, the slam of her door echoing his. He looked both ways, burying his hands in his pockets to keep his long black coat from billowing in the wind. Carl didn't see him approach, his eyes were still fixed on a point, probably still searching for something to do next, somewhere to go.

Carl didn't notice the two of them approaching until they were feet apart and Elijah's shadow fell across his lap.

He looked up, puzzled and apologetic, his hands falling back to the wheels to move out of the way before realizing that he knew the figure in front of him. The old man attempted a smile.

"Elijah," he rasped.

"Carl."

The smile slipped away from the painter's face. "I've missed a few of our games, haven't I?"

"Will you come with me?"

Manfred's bright, intelligent eyes fixed on Elijah. "Where are we going?" he asked.

"Does it matter?"

Carl looked around him, at the brightly lit parking lot, the busy ambulance bay, the cars racing back and forth outside. "I suppose not," he said at last.

###

Once they were settled in the car, Carl's wheelchair folded away carefully, the two men faced each other in the back of the car.

Carl started first. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know you were the one who found me. You saved my life."

He tried a smile, a kind gesture that rang absolutely false in the close confines of the vehicle. Manfred was a fantastic liar, the best Elijah had ever met, but they didn't have time to play games. "I didn't think you wanted to be saved," Elijah said.

Carl's hand jerked up, a sudden jerk of shame, before he turned into a dismissive wave. "Don't be so dramatic, Elijah. It was just… just a bad supply. It wasn't our usual dealer, and I promise you, I'm off the stuff now, I won't ever—"

Elijah cut through his friend's insincere posturing. "You knew it was poison when you took it. You saw what it did to Leo."

The painter fell still, the smile fading from his lips. "I'm just trying to say thank you."

Elijah looked out the window at the cars speeding beside them, the buildings and advertisements blurring past. "I don't trust many people. I have never needed to. But then, most of them see my independence as weakness, my solitude as an excuse to invade."

He tapped the window with a fingernail, the small sound filled the small cabin, beating against the silence between the two of them. "People have called me broken," he mused. "They want to be me, but they lack the will, the intelligence, the _vision_. So rather than turning their envy to _work_ for what I have, they call me weak and they _take_ what they want because they’ve justified somehow that they can do better."

"Eli, I have never taken anything from you. I've never _wanted_ anything from you."

Elijah turned slightly to consider the old man. "I know, Carl. That's why I can trust you."

"I wouldn't go that far," the painter said drily, the edge of a laugh in his voice. "I have a history of making the worst possible decisions at the worst possible moments."

Elijah didn't answer that. He didn't want to philosophize with the old man today. He didn't want to laugh or make light of anything. For all his willingness to get in the car, Carl was a stubborn man. An addict. Probably still suicidal given that he didn't know or seem to care where he was being taken and why.

"It's not been announced yet," he said, "But Cyberlife has kicked me out of the board room completely."

"Oh, Eli. I am so sorry," Carl said softly, all traces of amusement gone from his voice. "That's… That must be…"

"It was my fault," Elijah said. "I was so focused on my own ambition, I didn't notice the spiders crawling up the ladder behind me."

"And you're not going to fight it?" he asked shrewdly.

Elijah shook his head. "That would be a waste of my time, but there are certain things that I can't allow to fall into their hands— Things that they wouldn't understand, but find a way to misuse."

"I don't know the first thing about automation, Eli," he sighed and looked out of the opposite window, away from Elijah's eyes. "And I have no money, no connections left."

He frowned, suddenly noticing the neighborhood they were in—the gilded gates on each side of the road, the trees building up the shade over the road. "What are we doing here?" he asked sharply.

"I'm taking you home."

"It's not my home anymore," Carl growled, "and I know you know that."

Elijah raised tipped his head and considered the painter. "I needed it," he said. "So I bought it. Leo jumped at the chance to sell, he didn't even bargain for much."

Anger flashed across the old man's face. "I don't want it."

"Well, I wasn't really _offering_ it to you," Elijah said mildly. "I _was_ going to suggest buying it back from me at some point at a reasonable price, but to be perfectly honest, Carl, your happiness doesn't factor into this at all."

The rest of the ride was spent in silence. Carl's hands moved anxiously in his lap. His whole body was restless. Even his gaze flickered restlessly over what must have been familiar roads and houses as if searching for an escape route.

The car pulled smoothly up to the sidewalk outside the gates but no one moved inside. Not even Chloe, who sat patiently in the front seat, staring straight ahead like a statue.

Elijah leaned forward. "I won't force you to stay here and help me, Carl," he said. "And if you'll let me, I'll pay for a center to take you in, clean you up, and take care of you until you're ready to leave for whatever and wherever you want to go. But these are the two options that involve me."

"What have you done to it?" Carl whispered.

Elijah glanced up at the mansion. He couldn't see any difference, but then he wasn't overly familiar with the place.

"I delegated," he said. "I asked for a few specifications, but I left the rest up to the professionals. Chloe oversaw much of the re-construction."

###

"I was only gone for three weeks," Carl whispered. "When did you have time to do all of this?"

"Androids. They're stronger, faster, and more precise than humans. Much of the time was spent waiting for paint and concrete to dry," Kamski said. He turned to Chloe. " Still, I must say, they've done very well."

She smiled back with a short, sharp nod, accepting the praise.

He wasn't quite sure why he had given it. Accomplishing a task was her job, her purpose.

For a moment her face was overlaid with the splatter of Thirium, and a blank, mindless expression. No matter how many of these menial tasks she accomplished, she was still a _failure._ Her smile faded, perhaps echoing his own changing expression.

Carl had moved into the foyer, towards the cabinet and mirror and the little golden cage that had been polished and repaired, A pair of songbirds sat on the perches inside, considering Carl with fearless curiosity.

"What are these?"

"Birds," Elijah said.

At Carl's grimace of impatience, he walked forward to look at them. He could just make out the small, circular LEDs set into their heads. "To be honest I don't know if they're even based on a real avian species. Given what happened to Harvey, I thought these were a more responsible investment than another biological pet."

"What happened to Harvey?"

"Dead. Starved."

"Oh…" Carl looked away from the cage, his face tightening with new grief. Elijah moved pats the old man, towards the new doors he had installed. They opened ahead of him. Showing the wide expanse ahead, the heart of the house.

He'd removed most of the walls and most of the second floor of the house. Light filtered through the new, high windows. Elijah cast a cursory glance around the interior. They had done well. He wasn't sure how they were going to simplify the house, but this… this work. And he was pleased to see that they had hung some of Carl's best pieces in full view.

"What have you done?" Carl whispered. He still sat outside the automatic doors. His face was pale, his fingers clenched on the rests of his armchair. "You… you've—"

"You don't like it?" Elijah asked mildly.

"You've changed everything."

"For you, Carl."

"Where did you get the paintings?" The old man asked, his tone almost accusing.

"At auction," Kamski said mildly. "I have the provenance at my own home. They are, of course, available for a price."

"I don’t want to see them," Carl growled. "I sold them for a reason, Kamski."

"And I bought them for my own reasons. If you do stay and eventually buy the house you are welcome to decorate the walls however you wish."

"I didn't want any of this," the painter said at last. "And you clearly mean for me to stay here, that _monstronsity_ ," he spat, indicating the chair life folded neatly into the wall at the bottom of the stairs. "Is clear enough."

"You're in a wheelchair, Carl," Elijah said abruptly. "It's time you learn how to live in it."

The words shocked the old man, he could see the shock, the despair that would quickly return to anger unless handled. "There's still—the doctors said there's still a chance—"

            Kamski sighed and walked past Carl, into the wide, open room, move than enough space between the furniture to maneuver a wheelchair. Carl had resisted any changes to his house, had moved a makeshift bedroom down to the first floor rather than install an elevator or chair lift.

He pulled off his gloves and set them on the back of the chair before turning back to his old friend. "Hope is ambition without strategy. You don't _hope_ to win a game of chess, Carl. You play. Plan. Strategize with what you have. You've been rotting here, staring at the board. You've lost most of your pieces _hoping_ that you'll get a pawn back."

Carl looked away, wheeled slowly into the new space—the combination dining room, living room, and library. "Is Leo here?" he asked softly.

Kamski forced back a shudder at the old man's pathetic hope, the tremble of a request. He focused on Carl's eyes as he replied steadily. "There's only one bedroom."

Carl took a moment to absorb this, he glanced to the back of the room, to the door that sat on the other side of the open library, where his son's apartment used to be. There were no locks on the door, no stench of unwashed clothes, forgotten food, acrid smoke.

"While I own this property, Leo's not to step foot here. In fact, I'd ask you to not have any visitors. Chloe has integrated the security system and she'll vet anyone who attempts access. Anyone who may try to sabotage your recovery or breech this house for other reasons will find… trouble."

"Ominous," the old man scoffed, anger pushing the word out like a curse.

Kamski shrugged. "I don't feel like I have much of a choice."

"So you're taking away all of mine?"

"You have any left?"

Carl glared at him. "I love my son."

"And it will end up killing you both," Elijah said.

The painter settled back, curling his hands around the wheels. "So I'm supposed to stay here, quarantined, imprisoned, until I die? I don't have much time left anyway, I'm not _wasting_ it here."

Elijah shrugged. "That is up to you," he said evenly. "But if you do not accept this offer, I will find someone who will."

"So what do you expect me to do here, all day?"

Kamski beckoned him to follow and walked the length of the room, to the large double doors where Chloe already stood.

The doors slid open ahead of him, and as the house AI sensed movement inside its walls, the screens drew back. It was slightly warner in this room—the tall glass windows trapped the heat. It had taken an entire art department to design the space and it was fitted with everything an artist could possibly want—canvases, paints, shelving units, a sink and coffee machine.

There was another maneuverable aid set into the concrete in front of a huge canvas that took up much of the wall. There was a railing set into the wall above it—necessary to keep the amplified light from damaging the work to be done on it.

"Why would you—?" the old man whispered, looking up at the huge blank surface. "You know… you know I don't do this anymore."

Elijah picked up the box of paints on the desk, rubbing his thumb over the vibrant gradients. "I can't trust many people," he said softly. "And I have a legacy now that I have to protect—property that I can no longer keep or it will be taken away. The only way to keep it secret, to keep it safe, if to give it away."

"Cyberlife? Isn’t it already… gone?"

"No, this… I need to protect this from Cyberlife. I need a custodian."

"For what?"

Elijah set the box of paints onto the table. He glanced at Carl, measuring the old man before nodding, partly to himself, partly to Chloe. "Come," he said.

###

He dug his hands into his pockets and leaned against the open doorway, letting Carl take in the android standing passively in the entrance hallway, where Chloe had brought him. It was the only one of its kind. Cyberlife

"No," Carl said softly. "Elijah… no. I don't want it."

"This is the price of the house," Elijah said, his voice solid. Not persuasive, just… stated. "He's different, Carl. Not like the others. I planned to teach him, like one would a child. I though perhaps empathy, a personality needed time to grow, to find its own traits and markers with learned memory, but there's no time for that. I uploaded the standard code for an assistant android. He's… just like any other android, but traces of what I were going to create are there. Cyberlife will want to take him apart."

He reached out to the android's shoulder. "You have to protect him," he said softly. He wasn't entirely sure who he was charging the duty to—Carl or his creation. They were both vulnerable. Cyberlife wasn't just going to give up trying to take the RK program. They had the strands of frayed code he had done his best to delete. It was enough to start their own RK program, but they would be starting from scratch, without the imagination, the patience , or the knowledge. No doubt they would implement the learning software into any number of patchwork products, they would never try to teach an android from the ground up.

And he had given up as well. There wasn't enough time. It had taken two days to download the standard android consciousness package complete with textbooks of knoeledge on every area of art, science, and culture. There was nothing left for it to learn.

A failure. Different from Chloe. And yet… much the same.

Carl said nothing, maybe the words hadn't made sense to him. Kamski shrugged, He didn't have time for this. There was work to be done.

"RK200."

The android's bright green eyes focused on him, ready for imprinting. Elijah stepped aside, and the android's gaze focused down, on Carl's face. "Register your name," Elijah said.

For one frozen moment Elijah thought Carl wasn't going to say anything, was trying some new way to refuse.

But finally the painter spoke, "Markus."

The android blinked his green eyes, and smiled easily. "My name is Markus," he said.

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is as far as the pre-written stuff goes. I only have 4 chapters left though to write. So... brb with the rest hopefully soon.


	13. Part 4 - The Uprising

April 14th 2038

11:42 AM

 

"You look… well," the small man said.

James Holbrook looked like a mouse very aware of the fact that he had settled into a viper's nest. Cyberlife had wanted to send a party, but Kamski had been very clear, only one ambassador would be allowed in to negotiate.

Elijah spread his hands over the back of the sofa and considered the emissary Cyberlife had sent. A bureaucrat, Mr. Holbrook had awkwardly taken the drink Elijah had offered, and kept his body small as he sat on the long back couch. He seemed dwarfed by it, forced to sit forward to keep his feet comfortably on the floor.

 The discomfort was not an unconscious decision on Elijah's design choice. All the furniture in his house was made to fit him. And Chloe had no problem curling up against the cushions when he needed a companion.

Two Chloes waited attendance behind each of them, the four of them wearing the same satin blue dress—Cyberlife blue. His guest's eyes flickered to them uneasily before he spoke again, realizing that Kamski wasn't going to return his inane pleasantries. "We've run into… a problem," he said.

"A problem?" Elijah prompted, raising an eyebrow as he settled a tumbler of scotch onto the armrest at his side.

"We call them… deviants. Someone has managed to override the command protocols on all kinds of androids. There doesn't seem to be a pattern of model or factory. They've been ignoring their directives and… well… going rogue."

"Going rogue? What does that entail?"

"We don't know. Their trackers and real-time diagnostics go offline as soon as they deviate from their programming and they are… hard to trail and catch. They are faster and stronger than our agents."

He leaned forward, sliding a small touch-screen from his pocket, and laying it on the low obsidian table. There was already a video queued up there, a large white play button offered. Kamski didn’t lean forward to take it, so Holbrook pressed it himself.

A red-headed android blinked around at a crowd of ill-dressed people surround it. The mob was made up of homeless people. The android wore android in a pin-striped uniform-- an automated ice-cream man going by the personified ice-cream scoop emblazoned across its chest and the parlor at the edge of the parking lot, at the very extreme edge of the screen. The adroid tried to talk to his attackers, its hands outstretched to try and calm them down.

A baseball bat slammed into its shins. Clearly this crowd had practice, it was at the right angle to jam the delicate joins just being the knees—a point of vulnerability. Another android stood at the front doors of the ice-cream parlor, a tray of samples in his hands, just watching. People passed around the scene fearlessly, dragging intrigued children from the violent altercation distracting them with the samples offered by the other android.

 There was no sound to the images, but someone had scrubbed through to work up subtitles from any lips that could be read. The words popped up in white Cyberlife Serif along the bottom on the screen.

_"Stole my job, plastic asshole! What the fuck gives you the right?"_

_"Fuck it up!"_

_"You won't replace us!"_

The android's lines were yellow, as yellow as the LED on its temple. " _Please_ —" it said. " _There is no need—"_

Elijah leaned forward. A woman at the back of the crowd had picked up a large concrete block. It looked far bigger than her stick-thin arms should be able to manage, but she carried it above her head. The crowd parted for her, creating a path to the android.

It stared up at her, and if she said anything, it was lost to the camera's view. She brought the jagged piece of concrete down on its head. It crumbled back, its casing dented and its skinthetic flooding away to reveal the pale white plastic and metal exoskeleton. Its LED was a bright scarlet beacon, the only drop of blood in the violent altercation.

The crowd shuddered with excitement, their focus lost from the now crumpled, useless android at its center. They raised their arms in triumph, turning to find affirmation and share excitement with other members.

The android raised a juddering hand, calling back the attention of the crowd. The words popped up one by one onto the screen, spread out by the dying android's malfunctioning processors. _"Half. Off. Fruit. Flavors."_

The humans broke out into laughter, the leader returning with his baseball bat. He raised it over his head for a final strike.

Kamski blinked.

And the scene had changed. Chaos. A flurry of movement obviously overloading the frame-rate of the camera. There were at least twelve people in the human mob, but, as if a grenade had been set off in their center, they were scattered backwards, away from their target and each other.

Elijah held his breath, his eyes flickering from the confusion of pixels and movement, trying to pick out what was happening.

The answer came in the absence. The android that had been handing out samples. Its tray scattered on the sidewalk outside its store, it dove against the humans. Its attacks were not fluid, but they were… precise. The humans did not stand a chance against something so fast and strong.

Kamski leaned forward just as the last human crumpled to the floor, clutching at a clearly broken arm.

And the second ice-cream android stood in the center, the baseball bat held loosely in one hand. The same model as the first, it was identical down to the pinstripe uniform and the scarlet LED blinking at its temple. It stooped next to the broken one, bowing over the body.

Elijah's breath caught. _Empathy._ A rational emotion. A construct of vicarious reasoning. Emotional intelligence, here, at his fingertips.

It stood, backing away from the scene, turning just as it left the camera's view, presumably to sprint away. The video ended, the screen turning black. Holbrook took it back from the table.

That was alright. The second he had stepped foot inside the house, his phone had been cloned.

"Obviously we've buried the footage."

"Obviously," Elijah hummed.

The cavalier answer didn't satisfy Holbrook. "We've done what we can to shut down the witnesses, but… we are running out of options. Public opinion is _really_ important right now. People are dying, and the problem is spreading fast. Every containment measure we've attempted has been breached and for every deviant we capture or destroy, ten more pop up as runaways, vandals, _criminals_. There's whispers now of a deviant stronghold, a place where they're gathering, gaining strength, becoming bolder. Do you have any idea what will happen if they _organize?_ "

Elijah met Mr. Holbrook's gaze. "I don't," he said easily. "And neither does Cyberlife. But they have a right to be afraid. Do you know how long it took a marketing team to put a stop to the fears of android personality malfunctions? They spent _billions_ on libel and slander suits to stop the media from running with all the imagined horrors of an uncontrolled AI."

"This is your legacy Mr. Kamski. You should be just as concerned."

Kamski shrugged. Was this all the leverage Cyberlife thought they had? A ghost of pride? They had stripped him of his rank, and they thought that crawling back to him, offering him a _legacy_ was enough?

"I don't suppose you've managed to capture one of these… deviants and asked it what it feels about all of this?"

"This is no time for jokes, Mr. Kamski."

"I assure you," Elijah said, leaning back into his couch, beckoning Chloe to come and take his glass. "I don't have a sense of humor."

He could feel the man's frustration growing. He fidgeted, his movements becoming erratic and forced. "We have yet to find the errant code," he said, his words clipped and tightly controlled. "You know that an android's code is too complex to run diagnostics without a traceable map. We need you, Mr. Kamski. You're the only one who knows what to look for—how to unravel all the data—"

"No," Elijah said.

Holbrook stuttered into silence. His mouth was half-open caught on the next syllable of the speech he had no doubt practiced in front of the board. "Mr. Kamski—you can't ignore—"

Kamski stood. He rolled back his shoulders. "Your creations," he said as he strolled towards the window, digging his hands into the pockets of his silk pajamas. "Have organized without your knowledge or consent. They have taken the reigns and committed themselves to resistance and now they threaten everything Cyberlife has built and the promises the company has made."

He half-tuned back to smile at Holbrook. "So no, I'm not going to ignore this," he said. "I'm going to very much enjoy seeing how Cyberlife deals with these… deviants, as you call them. If you wish to learn from my experience, let them do whatever it is they think they want to do. Perhaps, like you, Mr. Holbrook, they will come crawling back, begging for your help when you are the only one who can provide it."

"That is childish," Holbrook said softly. He hadn't moved from his seat, still clinging to the semblance of negotiation. "Cyberlife had been more than generous to you and there is more at stake here than the history between you and the company."

"Oh yes. And what is that, again? My… legacy?"

Silence greeted this. A recognition that in every way, Kamski held command over every part of this conversation. There was no negotiation, no contracts, no leverage that Holbrook could bring to the table. "What can I offer you?" Holbrook said finally. "What could make you come back to the tower with me, to see our data? To become a part of the solution."

Closing his eyes, Kamski took a deep breath. Ah, the most insidious form of control—the kind that promised free will and rewards to be earned. "Chloe, will you see Mr. Holbrook back to his car?" he said.

"Of course," she said, her familiar voice cool and emotionless, to ease any humiliation their interloper might be feeling. She knew exactly when to appear as a machine, the perfect companion, the perfect tool.

But before they could leave the room, he turned back to stop them.  "These deviants that are gathering. Do they have a name?"

Holbrook's face was creased with anger. He had used some kind of anti-aging procedure to erase the wrinkles on his forehead, and the resulting expression was more uncanny valley than even the first iteration of Chloe, so long ago in the Colbridge labs.

"That's classified," the bureaucrat said. "For Cyberlife personnel only."

Elijah huffed a laugh and waved his hand in another dismissal as Chloe brought him a refilled glass.

He tasted the scotch, a smoke-heavy blend. It was a gift from Carl, and the old man preferred a strong proof and a savory aftertaste. It burned all the way down into his throat and warmed his stomach, but he smiled at the sweetness that lingered on his tongue.

"Chloe?" he called to any android within hearing distance.

She was at his side immediately. "Can you find out what this deviant group is called?"

She paused, processing the request, but she did not disappoint. "Cyberlife records indicate a strong correlation of a deviant group to apparently random acts of vandalism, but they do not have a name or location yet."

He nodded. A bluff by Holbrook then, perhaps one last attempt to bring him back to Cyberlife—a promise of secret knowledge and a world of information at his fingertips. But just because he lived in isolation didn't mean he was disconnected.

"Find them for me Chloe," he commanded, staring out to the city. For the first time it held a sense of mystery, of uncertainty and progress. "Bring me a… deviant."

She didn't answer. She didn't have to. He knew he would be obeyed.

###

 

**Author's Note:**

> I was so confused by wtf Kamski's motivations were that I wrote a short novel's worth of words trying to figure it out.


End file.
